Scholarly Publishing in a Digital Age

The recent announcement, 12 February 2008, by Harvard University to require faculty to make copies of their publications available for placement on a server of the University in order to facilitate access has generated a large wave of interest in academia – not a tsunami but much more than a ripple in the pond. A range of comments have been posted on the announcement, some ecstatic (e.g., open access to scholarship 'just around the corner') and others emphasizing the limitations of the announcement ('only' involves the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and many options for faculty to circumvent the intent of the announcement). For reactions from a proponent of open access, see Michael Carroll's series of posts; see further article in Inside Higher Education.

The issue of open access to scholarship is part of a wider concern, publishing in the digital age, and last July a major report was released on a subdivision of this topic: University Publishing in a Digital Age. This well-documented and researched report suggests that the way scholars – and students – perform their work has changed radically during the past years: they "have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources" for both teaching and research, and the authors of the report predict that the trends in place will solidify: "We believe the next stage will be the creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media" (p. 4). Basically, the report argues that universities should become proactive and experiment with a range of electronic publishing alternatives, that publishing in the widest sense of the word should remain an integrated component of the 'core business' of universities, together with teaching and research.

The report builds on a wealth of recent literature including:

• John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age (2005);
  
• Richard Abel & Lyman Newman, Scholarly Publishing (2002); (consult this bibliography of resources on publishing for details of this and many other materials);
  
• Clifford Lynch, "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World," First Monday, Vol. 6, No. 6, 4 June 2001.
  
• Paul N. Courant, "Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their Kin) in a World of Google," First Monday, Vol. 11, No. 8, 7 August 2006.
  

Particularly interesting in the report are the illustrations of innovation regarding open access that have been initiated in some fields, like those for economics (RePec) and anthropology (AnthroSource). Some of these innovations involve arrangements with (commercial) publishers to create portals of material available, usually on a subscription basis (e.g. AnthroSource), but sometimes with no restrictions (e.g. working papers in the RePec database). Some of the initiatives involve creation of electronic texts of books, like undertaken by the Humanities E-Book project of the ACLS. The material on this site is only available on an institutional subscription basis and, for all of its value, is of a much different magnitude (smaller) and quality (extensive metadata on entries) than initiatives like the intent of Google to create an electronic library with millions of volumes during the course the next decade. This Google project, Google Books Library Project, called by the New Yorker Google's Moon Shot in an article published in February 2007, involves collaboration with many of the major research libraries in the United States and Europe to scan their collections, page by page, book by book; see further http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html.

Google isn't the only actor in this arena: Amazon has digitized "hundreds of thousands of the books it sells (quote from above-mentioned New Yorker article); another project is called Universal Library, spearheaded by Carnegie Mellon; and, as would be expected, Microsoft is collaborating with a range of partners in the Open Content Alliance. This legion of initiatives does not reflect easy sailing for open access and no one should expect scholarship and the depositories of knowledge to become freely available anytime soon. Perhaps the central problem with this objective is called copyright, and the 'battle lines' between those promoting such initiatives and the protectors of copyright. These battle lines are anything but clearly drawn, however; libraries are sometimes siding with publishers, arguing against the conditions and procedures being applied by Google, and libraries outside the Anglo-Saxon world point to an English / American bias in the Google approach and, initiated by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a counterweight was launched last year, called The European Library.

It is, of course, premature – if not foolhardy – to predict what will develop next in this long saga of open access to scholarship. A safe observation, however, is that the business of scholarly publishing is hardly standing still and some of the recent innovations (e.g., in the world of academic journals, the International Journal of Communication (IJOC) is particularly innovative and interesting) may pave the way for a shift in arrangements between author, reader, scholarly institution, and (commercial) publisher – in the direction of open access.