A Fork in the Road: OA Books and Visibility-Value in the Humanities | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

by Martin Paul Eve One of the great advantages of open access in the scientific disciplines is that the work of scientists can now be read by any interested party with internet access. While some readers will not be able to understand this, it is nonetheless easy for scientists to show their work. No longer must the public merely take on faith that scientists are doing their job. Instead, those publics can read the findings for themselves. There is self-evidential justificatory benefit for disciplines that make their research open. Yet what of the humanities and social sciences? In these disciplines, the monograph plays a substantial role in the dissemination of research. But, frequently, these volumes are extremely expensive because they do not see huge print runs. Progress towards open access for book-length work remains frustratingly slow. [...]