Re-Envisioning Humanities Infrastructure | February 22, 2021 | Charles Watkinson, Melissa Pitts

"...Envisioning humanities infrastructure as a similarly complex fabric and recognizing the university press community’s essential contributions to it will be crucial as higher education institutions and funders plan for pandemic-related economic impacts. University presses unquestionably play a significant role in the production of monographs, journals and digital projects, as well as in the curation of the scholarly record, particularly in the humanities. Powered by high-quality peer review, they function as a network of innovative laboratories for scholars; their combined impact is particularly clear in the growth of disciplines and the progress of interdisciplinary scholarship. They also increasingly incubate sophisticated inter-institutional collaborations, purpose-building platforms and practices responsive to the changing needs of scholars and knowledge itself....

University scholars, libraries and publishers alike have engaged multi-institutional funding and momentum to build open, community-owned, equitable systems for advancing humanities research. Examples include Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Next Generation Library Publishing, and the latest stage of OPERAS, the “European research infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities.”..."