Martin Paul Eve

“ Peer review is often thought of as inviolable and can be held in extremely high regard. After all, what could be better than a community of self-regulating experts deciding on the merit of a piece of work, in some cases without knowing the author’s identity? It sounds like the ultimate form of meritocracy. All is not, however, quite so rosy in actual implementation. Indeed, as far back as 2003, it was proposed by Carlos Alonso, Cathy N. Davidson, John Unsworth and Lynne Withey that the problems of scholarly communication cannot merely be confined to access and economics. ”

“ The other aspect of labour that is potentially hidden through the zero-price point of open-access research is publishing. While open access to research presents an object as free, this is not to say that academic publishing can ever be conceived of as a labour-free enterprise. Regardless of how the process is framed, even without any allowance for profit, publishers must be remunerated for their work. ”

“ However, the counterargument is that those who wish to succeed must be able to publish with reputable presses, as publication is the unit of accreditation, the validating branded proxy measure that can lead to a job. The bold claim that academic labour is different from other forms of work in some respects, with regard to the outcome of research material, is therefore only partly true. Scholarship is different from other forms of output, in theory, because academics are paid to give their work away. In the current implemented reality, however, it is a form of labour like any other. ”

“ Open access benefits the sciences and humanities about equally, but has been growing faster in the sciences. That may seem odd until we realise that benefits aren’t the only factors affecting growth. Sunlight benefits all plants about equally, but some plants live in dry climates, some at high altitudes, some in rocky soil.
Open access (OA) helps readers find, retrieve, read and use the research they need. At the same time, it helps authors enlarge their audience and amplify their impact. Those are the main benefits. But these benefits lead to others. ”

“ Picking up where Chapter 1 left off, ‘open licensing’ refers to conditions under which a copyright holder allows others to reuse material in ways that go beyond those specified within the fair use (or ‘fair dealing’) provisions of copyright law. Open and free licensing, like open access, has a history rooted in the free software movement. However, to truly get to grips with licensing, whether open or not, it is first important to understand how these phenomena sit in relation to copyright. Licensing does not override, and its goal is not to abolish, copyright. ”

“ Open-access articles and books retain an exchange-value because they are of use-value to people other than the creator, regardless of whether the object is purchased at a monetary sum. This, then, presents the opportunity for others to extract surplus value from the labour of academics, which explains, at least in part, why centre-right governments are so keen on OA. That said, even those who do not share such an agenda can nonetheless find themselves in sympathy with some forms of open access purely because they may create a level playing-field for access to research. ”

“ The people who perform the labour of publishing, however, move about between jobs and set up new companies, as in any other field. That the same individuals, with the same skillsets, could have different reputational appeal to scholars based upon brand illustrates, once more, the idiosyncrasies of prestige as it currently stands.
The differences between books and journals, in these respects, are often over-stated. There is a nonetheless pressing need to ensure that the transition to an open-access model preserves those aspects of the monograph that are of use to scholars. ”

“ Open access does not require any changes to peer-review practices any more than the codex meant that readers had to abandon their palaeographic antecedents. There might, however, be practical ways in which a moment of technological change could enable us to see, with apologies for inverting Winston Churchill’s well-known aphorism, that perhaps our review practices are not so wholly democratic, not so entirely objective, fair or community-based; that they may only be the best that have been tried, apart from all the others. ”

“ There are undoubtedly other areas of practice, but these seem to constitute at least some of the essence, and use values, of research in the humanities. Some of these are directly shared with the sciences. Of course, it is also clear that research in the humanities may not be purely ‘used’ in a practical sense and frequently exists to inform without a clear applicable use, at least in the sense of a market economy. However, within the spheres where use can be identified, it is important to consider how open access impinges upon each of these areas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Use beyond ‘fair dealing’
One way among many of conceiving of research work in the humanities is as an argument/refutation dialectic between scholars. Under such a formulation, research work is supposed to be an ongoing effort of communicating in public to negotiate on areas of contention in order to reach a shared truth or understanding. Given that this is the case, it can be surprising to see how little engagement there often is between scholars in print. This is jointly driven by incentives for originality and, on occasion, by a prohibitive copyright situation. ”

“ From this thinking about market agency approaches, gold open access throws into relief the anomalies of ascribing a monetary value for the purchase of a research article or book, given that the primary audience for its purchase is the same as its genesis. That said, eliminating this demand-side price and instead thinking of an OA article or book as ‘free’ (and labour-free) can lead to the fallacy that a gold open access work could resist the commodity form. If something is given away for free, such logic would run, is it a commodity? ”

“ One of the most compelling arguments for legislated OA policies is that governments should assure public access to the results of publicly funded research. This argument is widely effective because it aims to accelerate the research we’ve already decided to fund with public money, increase the return on the public’s large investment in research, and improve fairness to taxpayers. There’s no downside for the public interest, only an incomplete upside. There is more public funding for scientific research than for humanities research. ”

“ Secondly, in one (admittedly somewhat negative) reading of peer review, it is possible to see the filter-first method as a development entwined as much with economics as with quality. Historically, one of the key functions of the gatekeeper has been to reduce the quantity of permissible material; clearly, for economic reasons, not everything that is submitted can be published. This was not only an effort to avert what is now called ‘information overload’ and what are perceived as low standards, but also because each issue of a print journal or each book had a specified page budget. ”

“ Prestige, however, is a proxy measure for quality. It economically mirrors academic labour scarcity because it stands as a surrogate in order to avoid the labour-intensive practices of constantly reappraising academic material in every situation. A journal’s or publisher’s prestige, then, can be considered as a labour-saving shorthand that, in theory, should denote a venue in which top experts deemed other material to be first rate. ”

“ As I have already noted, there is nothing in the concept of open access that means anything must be done differently except to lower price and permission barriers to research. Indeed, Peter Suber is at pains to specify that open access is not about circumventing peer review;1 an especially important observation given some of the misconceptions identified by the OAPEN-UK project. In this light, it might be fair to ask why it is necessary to discuss innovation, changes to editorship or modifications to peer review at all. ”

“ Opponents of open licensing fear reputational damage, which is the core currency for academics, and the erosion of academic citation norms, let alone the potential economic consequences for publishers. Yet the core questions that I will address later are, from the advocate’s perspective, whether the time-limited copyright monopoly, when free of financial gain, was ever intended to be used to protect the integrity of work. ”

“ Without copyright, anybody could do anything to anybody else’s work, from redistributing to altering, and there would be no obligation to acknowledge the original source. While most software licenses are designed to use copyright to restrict the end-user’s freedom to modify the underlying source code and/or redistribute the program, Stallman’s license reverses this, using the authority of copyright to stipulate, explicitly, that the source code for applications must be made public to allow anybody else to view, redistribute and, most importantly, modify the program. ”

“ Conversely, reviewers would surely also be prone to appraise the author’s identity in this case.
Evidently, in each of the cases where anonymity is removed, during the review process itself, there are problems that seem, to some degree, worse than the flaws in a double-blind setup. However, this solely applies when discussing a gatekeeper model in which a paper only sees the light of day so that the journal may be associated with the most exclusive papers in order to protect its brand. Other, more radical, experiments in the sciences have worked to change this. ”

“ In short, regardless of how long it takes to produce an article or volume of research, for which there may be extremely good reasons, there seems little rationale for slower publication after that point. A ‘slow humanities’ may lead to more rigorous work, greater care, higher levels of feedback and better research. How slow publication, after peer review, might also contribute to any of those aspects is less clear. ”

“ Journal articles tend to be primary literature in the sciences and secondary literature in the humanities. In the sciences, books tend to synthesise research published in articles, while in the humanities articles tend to report on the history and interpretation of books. Tenure in the sciences depends more on published articles than on books, while tenure in the humanities depends more on published books than on articles. ”

“ It is also fair to say, though, that publishers’ revenue models will have to change if any forms of national mandate for monographs come into play. While savvy publishers are already thinking ahead to such a scenario and beginning to experiment, others are only on the very cusp of understanding the implications of infinite, free, digital dissemination for their practice. Humanities academics, likewise, are playing catch-up against the science-driven journal market from which mandates have been derived. ”

“ Placing work under a Creative Commons license is an irrevocable act; one cannot rescind the rights one has bestowed on others after the fact. It is important to reiterate, as above, that these licenses do not replace or abolish copyright because, without copyright, an author could not make any claim over the work, including the right to attribution. ”

“ Assuming, however, that a move beyond green to a gold route was desired, one in which publishing labour was remunerated from the supply side, one essential truth must always stand as a starting point: there is enough money within the total global system to cover the current rate of publication. Certainly, under the present arrangement, there is an insufficiently equitable distribution of capital among institutions to allow everyone to have access, an aspect that could just be reversed to the supply side through article or book processing charges for gold open access if care is not taken. ”

“ Even if, then, there is no fundamental tension between open online dissemination and the form of much humanities work, it is nonetheless no simple task to define precisely the role of research in the humanities subjects, as apart from the sciences. ”

“ Because the ensuing research is freely and openly available to all, supporting institutions are not, themselves, ‘buying’ a commodity item. Instead they are banding together to bring to fruition projects that would not otherwise exist. Such an approach circumvents the economic problems engendered by the inherent micro-monopolies that are seen in scholarly communications. It could also make possible gold open access publishing without processing charges, which could work extremely well for the humanities discipline. ”