review of Open Access Humanities by Martin Eve | Tim McCormick

" ... Martin Eve’s recent Open Access and the Humanities, by contrast to the above, has a narrower and somewhat polemical purpose: to review current debates among mainly UK (some US + EU) academics over alternate ways to pay for and give access to their scholarly articles or monographs in humanities disciplines, and to advocate a particular (and controversial) model of academics giving away all copyright-based rights to their work except for attribution. The author is a lecturer at Lincoln University, UK, and a founder of a new publishing venture, Open Library of Humanities, of which I was a co-founder. While Eve endeavours to consider alternate views, they seem to be mostly views within a highly specific and recent debate, and generally the book seems over-situated in one context: funding/access issues of present-day, first-world, university-funded, humanities academics. Not, that is, humanities in general, or of scholars/researchers working in other contexts, or imagining any fundamental transformation in scholarly funding or outputs; nor even particularly considering what public interest is or might be served by reforms in this area. It essentially considers 'open access' from the standpoint of mainly current academics’ definitions, concerns, and self-interest. This leads to a number of blind-spots, weaknesses, and enclosures in his arguments, and a focus on rather incremental reforms. While presenting itself as reformist or even emancipatory, much of the argument of this brief yet laborious book seems to focus on conserving or justifying core aspects of academic publishing, and seems uncognizant of common critiques of and counter-models to the digital/knowledge ideas, and ideologies of ‘openness’ it espouses; such as those of Ted Nelson, Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, Heather Morrison, or what Jeffrey Alan Johnson calls 'information justice.' Eve’s book also seems quite unaware of or unconcerned by other leading edges in open-access thinking, such as the logically obvious step of extending OA to patent-based intellectual property, not just the copyright-based portion of IP. Patent IP is of enormous value in the sciences, and like copyright IP, is often publicly funded and of global public interest: yet it continues to be aggressively privatized. (for a leading project in this area, see Defensive Patent License) ..."