So far in this series I have described two types of publishing we are going to see more of as the humanities (with the rest of academia) retool for the digital age: electronic publication of conventional scholarship, and Open Access publication. In this post, I discuss a third type of electronic publishing: the online archive. But wait a minute, you might say, archiving and publishing are very different things. Scholars publish; librarians archive. Right? Well, the lines have blurred, as has the very definition of what constitutes publishing today. But before discussing the changing nature of publishing, let me quickly define the online archive and sketch how it works.
Open Access is the major movement in scholarly publishing today. The humanities are behind other disciplines in understanding and adopting Open Access, but as the sciences are already discovering, Open Access is reinventing the field of academic publishing generally and will ultimately eclipse traditional publishing.
Please visit Academic Evolution, a blog I've broken out from this one. Discussion at Academic Evolution is focused on changes in higher education and issues regarding access, pedagogy, and publishing in the age of new media.
I offer a series of posts in which I will lay out my understanding of the radical changes that academic publishing is undergoing in general and within the Humanities in particular. This both continues and expands my prior posts and presentations on the Open Access movement. I'll take up each of the following in separate posts--inviting comments from any interested:
The presentation on Open Access that Jeff Belliston and I had previously prepared was well received yesterday by the assembled deans, the Academic Vice President, and the President of BYU. I was impressed by our Academic Vice President's keen interest in the issues. And while this institution is still a long ways off from something like the Harvard Open Access mandate for our faculty, there is clearly interest and awareness at the top.
At a presentation on Open Access to the Academic Vice President's Council at BYU last week we discussed changes in academic publishing and proposed moving toward a Open Access policy for this university comparable to Harvard's.
A key component of the Open Access movement is the rise of institutional and disciplinary repositories. While these are archives, their role will not be purely archival. A repository becomes a de facto publishing platform, and the publishing it will do will not be limited to republishing copies of scholarly articles that have first appeared elsewhere. An institutional repository will be a place where faculty can deposit their teaching materials. Open Access meets Open Teaching.
