Open Access and the Humanities

Abstract

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term 'open access' in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of 'pay-to-say' publishing. In this book, Martin Paul Eve sets out the histories, contexts and controversies for open access, specifically in the humanities. Broaching practical elements alongside economic histories, open licensing, monographs and funder policies, this book is a must-read for both those new to ideas about open-access scholarly communications and those with an already keen interest in the latest developments for the humanities. This title is also available as Open Access via Cambridge Books Online.

The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access

“…OA implementation, however, is complex-whilst the idea of OA is relatively simple, embedding it in practice involves addressing a complex set of challenges [21,26]. Increasingly noted in the literature is the rise of OA mandates, their positive impact in driving change but also the challenges they create.…”

“…There have also been widespread calls for greater coordination across OA policies [2,28,29]. No more so than in the UK, where the complex set of mandates from the former RCUK [30] and HEFCE [6] (now both under the auspices of newly-formed government agency, UK Research and Innovation, UKRI), plus many medical research charities and other agencies such as the European Union, have created significant set of challenges for OA implementation [1,26].…”

“…However, as the OA agenda developed, there was a shift to a focus on marketing to researchers, implementing new workflows, and getting services up and running in practice, and this seems to have meant that copyright issues per se received less interest, at least in the literature. However, the rise of OA and OA mandates has pushed copyright once more to the foreground, highlighting issues of licensing agreements, academics' understandings of copyright, and institutional policies on intellectual property [2,21,26,36]. In particular, the relationship between authors and their institutions in the area of copyright has become an area of focus.…”

“…Ober, in 2006 questioned handing all rights over to publishers, arguing that this contributed to their increasing profits [20], and Suber warned of a permissions crisis, where the publishers' business models depend on maintaining access barriers acquired through owning the copyright [21]. Nevertheless, the scholarly reward system continues to mean that academics trade their copyright to publish in their preferred journals, which has thus far been seen as more advantageous to them compared with any benefits they could gain from retaining their copyright [26,32,40]. It has been shown that many academics believe that publishing in traditional journals is most likely to contribute to promotions and pay rises, rather than making their work available in an OA form [41][42][43].…”

4d. Open Access in the United Kingdom

“…For most researchers, open access only became a matter of concern when their institution's funding became linked to it as a requirement. It is also the case that disciplinary disparities in implementation remain prevalent, with the humanities disciplines often lagging behind the natural sciences, although chemistry also remains weak (for more on this, see Eve, 2014).…”