Making Open the Default Position | Peer to Peer Review

"The faculty of the University of California system have adopted an open access mandate. This is huge. Not only will it put a lot of scholarship from ten notable universities online for the benefit of all, it signals a shift in perception of what is normal academic practice. It’s interesting that it has happened on the heels of a major scholarly society (The American Historical Association) issuing a draft statement arguing that digital open access to dissertations may harm young scholars, who should be allowed a six-year period in which to turn their research into a book contract in time for a tenure decision. Both statements invoke the importance of choice, but in different ways, and the difference has to do with assumptions about the default position for scholarship. In one case it’s open and in the other, closed. One says 'let’s make things better for all of us,' and the other says 'let’s make sure we don’t make things worse for those who are on the tenure track.' I was dismayed by the American Historical Association’s argument that open access to dissertations might harm a historian’s opportunity to reuse that research for a book, which (the Association argues) is the most important format for communicating history scholarship, and the normal expectation for an academic historian to achieve tenure. I also understand the complexities of the present moment for humanities scholars, which contribute to an urge to conserve one’s ideas in the hope that they can be alchemically transmuted by a publisher into prestige and a chance at a having  a steady academic job that pays a living wage. I am inclined to look favorably on student freedom of choice over blanket university policies that force a dissertation online, even though dissertations in the past had a public-facing identity as a matter of course. Insisting that finished and accepted dissertations should be theoretically public, but in as inconvenient a format as possible, seems absurd to me, and asking libraries to put printed dissertations on their shelves assumes (wrongly) that it will make them safely inaccessible to most people. This annoys me in exactly the way that I am annoyed when trade publishers describe going to a library to check out a book as such a lot of trouble that it’s the kind of friction that will preserve their business model. Clearly, those who are in favor of friction don’t have much experience with libraries, or they wouldn’t find them so terribly difficult and blissfully underused. The savvy proponents of the University of California mandate didn’t set their sights on the ideal. They were realistic and focused on journal articles, with an opt-out clause. Though some critics, such as Michael Eisen, feel this renders the mandate useless, I disagree. To gain the consensus such a broad mandate requires, some compromises have to be made, and that means allowing faculty a chance to exercise choice. What this mandate does, though, is make a joint public statement that public access to scholarship is important to the faculty of the UC system, so they will collectively favor publishers who support this goal and will avoid those who don’t. Though it won’t prevent faculty from publishing in venues that don’t support open access, it will require a conscious decision to do so, a decision that otherwise many faculty don’t make at all, because they haven’t been aware of what rights they have traditionally given up when they sign that fine print as casually as most of us click through terms of service. The American Historical Association, which as a publisher is skeptical about open access (mistakenly assuming it always operates on an author-pays model) and protective of the benefits its own publishing brings in terms of subscription revenue and membership retention, has taken a very different stand than the Modern Language Association (MLA). The MLA responded to concerns about junior scholars being able to have a book contract in hand before the tenure clock ran out by studying the matter and producing a thorough and well-researched report that recommended that criteria for tenure be changed. The report further questioned the nature of the dissertation, which (during a period of growth for scholarly book publishing) had become a 'larval monograph,' an identity of relatively recent invention. The MLA had a transparent member-driven process that gathered evidence and made evidence-based recommendations of the sort one would expect of conscientious scholars. It was forward-thinking, holistic in its analysis of scholarly publishing, and an impressive piece of scholarship in its own right.  Six years after examining tenure practices, the MLA revised its own author agreements to give authors copyright and encouraged them to circulate their work as widely as possible. Rosemary Feal, executive director of the association, argued that their journals ret