AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Gregory Crane: Junior Scholars, Publication and the Challenge of Open Access

"Several colleagues and I recently had occasion to speak with a number of very promising junior scholars, each of whom had undertaken work in a very challenging field of Classical Studies. I was struck by the fact that these conversations would not have sounded much different thirty years ago when I was starting out. A couple of the scholars did bring up digital projects but all assumed that the only way to publish was to produce the same kinds of articles and books that we have been producing for generations and to publish them -- if they could -- with the most prestigious commercial venues possible. And, of course, I understand entirely why they think this way -- they are fighting to survive and the academic programs of which they are a part still focus on scholarly communication as a private conversation among professionals. For now I set aside the major challenge. We will ultimately get to Open Access because we need Open Data, because we need, in turn, to be able to compute over both primary and secondary sources, even if we continue to focus on scholarly exchange for and among professionals. It may take a few years for this understanding to percolate through the field and for classicists to begin taking advantage of methods that already exist in 2014.  But even if there are battles to be fought, the war is already over. The world has already changed. We are just trying to figure out how to catch up and adapt to the many changes already around us. And, of course, those who will change this world will be a group of junior scholars who realize that they have the great good fortune to live in a completely new field -- one where we have not a single up-to-date edition, lexicon, grammar, or other reference work, where we can support the understanding of Greek and Latin in a global context, and where we can have a completely new, open conversations about what work the lucky few of us who are privileged to serve the study of Greek and Latin can pursue. I am old enough to remember when young students of English literature brought literary theory into the field and, to the extent that they were able, buried their predecessors with no small pleasure. The tools are already here for the next such generation to transform the study of Greek and Latin. Here, however, I want only to focus on economics and to produce some simple factoids. The Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) has been publishing 'timely open-access, peer-reviewed reviews of current scholarly work in the field of classical studies.' Having begun in 1990, the 2014 reviews mark 25 continuous years of operation and cover a generation of scholarship. Of course, BMCR can only cover a tiny subset of the publications in our field -- our bibliographic database, L’Année Philologique, reports on its current (December 2014) homepage that it produced 17,000 bibliographic records for 2012. But the subset is an important one: in effect, BMCR publishes peer-reviewed reviews of all the books that members of the field are willing to review for it. If you want to review a book and your review passes muster, then you can publish it in BMCR. Our print reviews need to stay within page limits. For BMCR, the limiting factor is scholarly energy. So I wrote a very simple program to scan BMCR web pages for prices (which BMCR regularly includes in the bibliographic record) ..."