Here is a copy of the comment that I have submitted for posting to the AHA Blog Entry entitled, "AAUP Calls for Cautious Approach to Open Access."
Some of the proposed approaches to addressing important
issues surrounding digital scholarship appear to be constrained by attempting
to work within the existing approaches to publication. With decreased funding
for traditional print publications that also ultimately restricts access as
most university and college libraries are forced to decrease their subscription
budgets, we should be focusing more on
the historical knowledge that could not only be more widely disseminated via
new media versus print media but also how a wider scope of individuals with
expertise in a particular scholarly area, including the teaching of history,
would be able to more fully peer review the new historical knowledge that could
then be made more widely available.
Heretofore, the composition and peer review of any new
knowledge in history has been primarily conducted behind gated doors. Some of
those doors appeared to be at least partially open, but that was usually only
to a few within a small circle of mentors and/or colleagues and would certainly
not be considered to be “wide open” to anyone and everyone with a potential
interest and expertise in the topic or subject at hand. Furthermore, the
existing publication apparatus presents significant lag time between
formulating and developing ideas and having them published in the wider world
due not only to peer review but also to the essential business end of physical
publication.
As Professor Rosenzweig mentions in the article referenced
above, reviews are an important component of any aspect of scholarship. One new
media case that he mentions that is worthy of further discussions is H-Net
Reviews [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/]. This online system has greatly
shortened some of the wait time in many scholarly areas and made reviews
available to a much wider audience – most notably those without access to
university libraries providing access to a wide range of journals. Because
H-Net Reviews is a much newer approach than the established gatekeeping of the
print journals, its dynamics of figuring out how to handle the large volume of
books available for review and matching them with the most appropriate and
qualified reviewers is both similar and different than its print predecessors.
Does a wider audience also mean a wider definition of those qualified to review
books? On the other hand, is getting the discussion going sooner rather than
later not another important component to consider? These are certainly issues we need to deal
with in our discussions about the future of publishing any and all types of scholarly
works in history.
With traditional publishing avenues becoming increasing
constrained by increasing costs, it is important to consider where we go from
here as this blog discussion does. However, we must also do more to think
“outside the box” and start from scratch when we begin to think about how new
knowledge is created. As a field, history has normally been a solitary writing
enterprise in contrast to many other areas of study that primarily rely on more
visibly collaborative writing efforts to produce new knowledge. This alone
makes any new approach more challenging. How much involvement of others do we
want as we think historically and produce knowledge that is worth publishing in
any format? Do we want the doors wide open at least at the beginning of the
formulation of historical scholarship? As individuals, how much do we need to
guard our intellectual property so that our ideas aren’t co-opted by someone
else in the competitive race for degree completion, tenure, and/or promotion? Thinking
aloud on blogs has already greatly opened the doors to a wider audience but how
does the new media-produced new knowledge add to what we need or want to know
about history? Or, is it more important to make sure more people know about
what other historians are thinking about so that shared interests and shared
expertise can produce greatly enhanced scholarship in both the short run and the
long run.
In other words, we have traditionally staked out our
intellectual territory by writing articles and/or books because the inherent
peer review in the print world is the ultimate stamp of credit and everyone
coming later has to argue in light of what the previous person has published on
the issue. How does this change in the new media world? Creative Commons [http://creativecommons.org/]
and its numerous licensing options do offer some alternatives even though many
historians are still uncomfortable even with this level of thinking outside the
box. Is there a way to use this type of licensing (Creative Commons or something similar) to protect our ideas in the same way that print does? Or
does this same protection still represent the gated doors of the traditional print
publishing world?
As historians, we need to discuss what we have to gain and
what we have to lose from more open access to scholarship in our field before
others determine that access for us.
