Open Access News

The humanities and social sciences need to give more attention and resources to building digital infrastructures within their disciplines, says a long-awaited report from the American Council of Learned Societies that is to be released today.

The report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," notes that the sciences have already made significant progress in creating "cyberinfrastructure" -- including the establishment of an Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation -- and that the humanities must overcome significant challenges to catch up.... Along the way, people will have to come up with new technological tools, solutions to copyright and preservation problems, and sources of money to provide "seamless access to the cultural record."

"The return on this investment will be a humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure that will allow new questions to be asked, new patterns and relations to be discerned, and deep structures in language, society, and culture to be exposed and explored," the report says.

The report recommends that universities and federal agencies invest more money in cyberinfrastructure, especially in open-access projects....

John M. Unsworth, dean of the graduate school of library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was the chair of the 11-member commission that wrote the report. He said in an interview that development of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities should coincide with digital efforts in the sciences.  "What we're hoping to insert into development of cyberinfrastructure here is an awareness of both the needs and the contributions of the humanities and the social sciences," he said. "We can't afford to have a separate but equal cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences....

In drafting the report, Mr. Unsworth said, the commission debated how to take a "reasonable" position on open access. "That's a complicated issue," he said. "Publishers and libraries are both critical parts of the infrastructure here, and they have different perspectives on that."

The Open Content Alliance, a group of libraries and corporations that are working on an open-access digital archive, is hailed in the report as a model. The alliance "has shown that commercial, nonprofit, and university content creators can cooperate in powerful ways to increase open access to cultural resources," Mr. Unsworth said, adding that the more closed and commercial digitization efforts of Google also have value....