A fragment of thought: The single largest challenge for the future of information publishing will be to find markers or frames that can accurately denote quality or truth at the level of the article or book (or other form) while still benefiting from the abundance of dissemination that the digital space can offer.
An email I received today about one of my open-access articles: So don’t tell me that nobody is interested or that there is no point in making niche esoteric humanities research open access or that everybody who needs access already has it or that the general public won’t understand your work or that because we charge for teaching we should charge for research. This is just one anecdote, for sure.
As a result of a discussion today, I thought it worth writing out some of my observations/thoughts on a few of the arguments, counter-arguments, and political alignments for and against open access. What, in other words, is the scope of OA? Should it be for work for which authors cannot reasonably expect to make a remuneration by direct sales alone?
I am extremely pleased to say that my latest peer-reviewed book, Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict has today been published by Open Book Publishers!
I can say, without a shred of doubt, that my experience with Open Book Publishers has been nothing short of excellent. For reference/comparison: I’ve published three other books with Cambridge UP, Bloomsbury and Palgrave. In all respects, OBP were at least as good, if not better in some areas, than some of the others. A few areas are worth commenting upon: The peer-review was excellent in terms of both rigour and speed.
I’m delighted to say that I have taken up an editorship, alongside Professor Bryan Cheyette, of the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series. I think this is an exciting time and opportunity to consider what it means to study contemporary writing in the present age and to deliberate upon the diverse methodologies, approaches, and concerns in my area of academic work. We therefore invite proposals as per the call below.
I don’t know David Golumbia, but I suspect I agree with him on many matters, actually. In particular, the centrality of an understanding of labour within a digital environment (that can too often mask its presence) has formed a core part of the 100+ keynotes that I have given on the topic of open access in the past two years (which is why OLH runs a model that requires universities to pay: we aren’t relying on volunteerism etc.
I’ve been gearing up for quite some time to write about the false labour dichotomies in the academy that seem to be emerging that put “academic labour” as some privileged space of difference from other types. This isn’t that post, which I haven’t had time to work on yet, but it is related. I don’t usually agree with everything that Daniel Allington writes. And that’s fine. Spice of life etc.
In Open Access and the Humanities , I wrote: OA and the Humanities was published by Cambridge University Press and some asked, given my critique of the prestige economy in that text, why I had opted to go with one of the oldest, most established, and most prestigious presses. The question is not hard to answer: I wanted a broad audience to read the work, including those who do place a high emphasis on the matters I critique.
A post today at the Scholarly Kitchen has spurred me to write something that I’ve been pondering for a while. Namely: how helpful is this idea of “paying it forward” as a way of funding scholarly communications? My take: I’m not convinced by author-controlled discretionary funds, with the emphasis of my scepticism falling on the author-controlled and discretionary parts in various degrees.
