Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication

Abstract

The last talk I gave at MLA 2012 was a keynote for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the text of which is below. I'd love any feedback you might have to offer.-Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication As you might guess from my title, this presentation focuses in large part on questions of open access as they might affect our thinking about the future of scholarly communication. "Open access," I'm sure I don't need to tell you, is a fraught concept among both scholars and publishers, one beset by a lot of misunderstandings, both intentional and unintentional. Arguments circulate out there saying, for instance, that open access will open the floodgates to a lot of bad scholarship, when in fact open access publishing is perfectly compatible with peer review, and there are many OA journals that are more selective than their closed-access counterparts. There are folks who argue that open access is financially unsustainable, or even, as has been suggested by the recent proposal of the Research Works Act in Congress, an unreasonable infringement on publisher income, when in fact a range of new models for open access publishing are coming into being, and several of the major commercial journal publishers have recently announced new OA ventures, which they of course would never do if they hadn't found a business model in it somewhere. On the other hand, there are equally misguided convictions out there that open access publishing is free; clearly that's not so. What I am hoping to do in this talk, however, is to shift our thinking about open access, for the moment, from a focus on costs to a focus on values, though without entirely leaving behind the overwhelming and at times quite grim economic realities by which we're surrounded. To begin, a bit of background: discussions of the possibilities for new open publishing models began online in the early 1990s, as a number of scientists and librarians recognized that the growth of the Internet made possible the free and open reproduction of scholarly literature. This is not to

Publishing between profit and public value: Academic books and open access policies in the United Kingdom

“…After all, the Budapest definition of open access allows for republication and reuse for commercial purposes, as long as the author is appropriately credited, and Barber et al (2013: 51) devote a mere three sentences in a 77-page report to explicating their assertion that '[m]uch of the value added [by universities in the future] won't be content'. As far as Pearson is concerned, given the ubiquity of information, academics might as well be 'giving it away' anyway (Fitzpatrick 2012), and UK government policies ensure that an entire nation's academics will be doing precisely that, even if global academic publishing practice itself does not wholly shift towards a gift economy as open access activists hope. The value, rather, is in repackaging that content with novel methods of instruction and assessment and in remixing or reconfiguring that content into awardable -and saleable -degrees and credentials.…”

“…The field of scholarly book publishing has been troubled for decades, with sales of monographs in the humanities and social sciences squeezed (Brienza 2012;Fitzpatrick 2011;Thompson 2005). Even non-profit university presses have been put under pressure by parent institutions desperate to bridge their own budget shortfalls.…”

“…Belfiore 2013;Eve 2013;Fitzpatrick 2011;Fitzpatrick 2012;Priego 2013;Suber 2012), and in the United Kingdom specifically policies aimed at the expansion of the scholarly knowledge commons through new digital technologies have been rapidly rolled in since Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gower's public boycott of Elsevier kicked off the so-called 'academic spring' in 2012 (see Brienza 2012;Howard 2013). However, the bulk of the attention in this context thus far has been given to journal articles and academic publishing companies like Elsevier, which specialize in periodicals (e.g.…”

Humanities Librarians and Virtual Verse: Changing Collections and User Services for Online Literature

“…Open access-"the world-wide electronic distribution of the peerreviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it" (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2015)-is a core part of scholarly communications in today's environment as evidenced by the findings of this study and because of the changes wrought by open access online literary publishing, the humanities are critically invested in this evolution. As Fitzpatrick (2012) argues, "Increasing the discoverability of scholarly work on the web, making it available to a broader readership, is a good thing, not just for the individual scholar but for the entirety of the field in which he or she works." (p. 354).…”

Commodification of the Information Profession: A Critique of Higher Education Under Neoliberalism

“…The creation and communication of scholarly knowledge could be more fruitfully remodelled as a gift economy rather than a market mode of exchange (Fitzpatrick, 2012). However, this opportunity is often seen as dissident rather than as an ethically rational, sustainable practice; an ideologically motivated risk that is undesirable to the neoliberalised information marketplace.…”