Roy Rosenzweig, Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?Perspectives, April 2005. Excerpt: 'Although the original force of the initiative was diluted through industry lobbying, the NIH measure represents government recognition of the principle that research, especially government-supported research, belongs to the public, which should not have to pay the prohibitively high subscription charges levied by many scholarly journals. The new policy affects few historians, but its implications ought to give us serious pause. After all, historical research also benefits directly (albeit considerably less generously) through grants from federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities; even more of us are on the payroll of state universities, where research support makes it possible for us to write our books and articles. If we extend the notion of "public funding" to private universities and foundations (who are, of course, major beneficiaries of the federal tax codes), it can be argued that public support underwrites almost all historical scholarship....The advantages of open access are fairly obvious and have been summarized well by key partisans such as Steven Harnad, Peter Suber, and John Willinsky. They note that journals benefit because their research is, in Suber's words, "more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful." Even more important, authors gain greater visibility, a bigger audience, and more impact. ...The most important beneficiaries of open access, however, are nonscholarly readers and citizens, who would gain entry to a world that is currently closed to them. Willinsky describes the lack of public access to electronic scholarship as "a secondary digital divide" that "affects health organizations in Indonesia, university students in Kenya,...anti-poverty organizations in Vancouver...science fair participants in Wichita and high school history teachers in Charleston."...Open access to scholarship fits perfectly with the founding principles of scholarly societies....But the AHA [American Historical Association] is a publisher as well as a scholarly society and, as such, giving away the scholarship found in the AHR threatens the economic basis of both the Association and the journal. [Rosenzweig then considers six ways to for the AHA to provide OA without putting itself out of business.] ...Regardless of one's view of the merits of open access (and my own position is obviously in favor of much freer access), these approaches require careful consideration by historians—if only because external pressures (from government, from the rising tide of the open access movement) are likely to force us to re-evaluate our policies sooner or later. But the more important reason to consider how we can achieve open access is that the benefits of broad and democratic access to scholarship --benefits that are within our grasp in a digital era-- are much too great to simply continue business as usual.' (Thanks to Muninn.)
(PS: This is a beautiful argument for OA in history. I wish every discipline had a high-profile essay of this cogency to kick the ball forward.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/13/2005 11:35:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
