In “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication in Non-Scientific Disciplines,” Martin Paul Eve considers why the humanities and social sciences have lagged behind the STEM disciplines in the widespread acceptance and implementation of open access. He argues that there are social and economic reasons for this gap in uptake. Eve provides the context for shifts in scholarly communication—namely the emergence of the “publish or perish” paradigm and the unsustainable serial subscription model—and suggests that it is a backdrop for both the sciences and the humanities. The latter, however, carries some discipline-specific baggage. The most pressing humanities-specific issue is that of the monograph. Although OA works very well for online, serial journal publishing, it works less well for long-form writing that is expensive to produce, is largely in print, and requires the production and distribution expertise of established presses. There is also a certain degree of prestige connected to large publishers in the humanities, which can be very valuable in a discipline that requires quality proxies for hiring and promotion purposes. As Eve adroitly writes, “a form of symbolic capital (prestige) is converted to material capital for various entities (academics who gain jobs and publishers who make profits) but only at the expense of the library budget” (719). Eve also points out that a pervasive anxiety of irrelevance breeds the idea that if a knowledge product is free / freely accessible it is less valuable than for-cost output. Regardless of these challenges, Eve remains committed to the necessity of pursuing open access for scholarly communication. “Business as usual,” he writes, “seems impossible. […] What must happen instead is at once to critically appraise what we need from a scholarly communications infrastructure and to simultaneously build pragmatic and non-damaging transition strategies to harness the full power of open digital dissemination ” (729).

 

Work cited

Eve, Martin Paul. 2015. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication in Non-Scientific Disciplines.” Online Information Review 39 (5): 717-32. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0103?journalCode=oir