Dis-counting Open Access in the Humanities

By Charles Watkinson (Associate University Librarian, Publishing, University of Michigan Library; Phone: 734-936-0452) <watkinc@umich.edu>

When Peter Suber, who literally wrote the book on Open Access (MIT Press, 2012), asks, “Why is open access moving so slowly in the humanities?” his refrain is typical of many commentators on open scholarship (Suber 2012, 2017). However, the assumption that arts, humanities, and qualitative social science (AHSS) disciplines are “lagging” in open access (OA) publication may reflect biases in our data sources rather than disciplinary realities.

Look beyond what libraries can easily “acquire” and catalog, and a vibrant, expanding ecosystem of OA publishing activities and outputs in AHSS disciplines is revealed. Rather than caricaturing AHSS as an OA backwater, librarians, publishers, and other information professionals should address their responsibility for neither adequately describing OA species (even keystone species) in the AHSS environment nor facilitating relationships between them.

AHSS scholars today value equity, openness, collegiality, soundness, and community. Through workshops with hundreds of researchers, the HumetricsHSS initiative has articulated these values as foundational to AHSS research cultures (Agate et al., 2020). The organizational structures that manifest such values are usually articulated as having the form of a “commons,” not a “firm.” However, we continue to support a classification and reward system that rewards competition over collaboration, the dominant individual rather than the collective whole, and industry over community.

As Pierre Mounier has pointed out, the fragmented, multimodal, and (to our publisher and library systems) messy nature of AHSS publishing output compared to the consolidation in STEM fields is not an accident. Instead, “the diversity of publication venues reflects the epistemic diversity of social sciences and humanities communities” (Mounier, 2018, p. 299).

Dis-counting “Traditional” Formats

Consider keystone species in the scholarly communication ecosystem like “The Book.” Even when OA outputs come in traditional forms, our systems fail to recognize them, especially if the languages and publishing houses authors use are unfamiliar. While only 5% and 10% of the books published by U.S. and UK university presses are open access, it is unsafe to assume that this low percentage extends to the ca. 86,000 monographs published annually (Grimme et al. 2019, Shaw, Phillips, and Gutiérrez, 2023).

In Europe alone, Agata Morka and Rupert Gatti identified vibrant (if not always well-supported or coordinated) OA book publishing activities across 14 countries in their 2021 landscape study (Morka & Gatti, 2021). While not all are in AHSS disciplines, over 1,000 OA books in Portuguese alone (with many Brazilian publishers) are available through the SciELO platform, which celebrated a decade of accomplishment in 2022 (Packer, 2022). Despite the efforts of the Directory of Open Access Books and the individual libraries and librarians that support it, records for OA books from English language publishers are presented confusingly in library acquisition tools such as OASIS and GOBI, RIALTO and MOSAIC, and foreign language OA book materials hardly at all.

The implications of the invisibility of OA books in library workflow tools extend beyond bibliographic search. Presence in a library catalog is a proxy for a broader landscape of essential metadata flows, including whether a book is preserved, reviewed, cited, or considered during its author’s career advancement reviews. Preservation is a precondition to long-term discoverability. Mikael Laakso found that only 19% of a sample of almost 400,000 OA books were included in a preservation system (Laakso 2023, 157). Discoverability is a precondition to credit in an increasingly metricized academic environment. Rebecca Bryant and Becky Welzenbach recently illustrated how an OA book drops out of the information supply chain between its publication and its (lack of) appearance in the Research Information Management (RIM) system that higher education administrations increasingly use to measure their faculty members’ productivity (Bryant et al., 2021). Meanwhile, two political scientists, Kim Hill and Patricia Hurley, have described how citation indices misrepresent disciplines that include notable book scholarship (Hill & Hurley, 2022). In the latter two case studies of dis-counting humanities literature, the outputs described are in English and published by longestablished U.S. university presses. The obstacles facing smaller or newer publishers, foreign language publishers, and publishers in non-anglophone countries are even more significant.

When AHSS scholars publish in OA journals (the “Journal” is another keystone species), information professionals again discount their work. A December 2023 catalog search reveals that Scopus identifies only 18% (2,000) of its indexed HSS journals as OA. That number is hardly representative. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) shows over five times more high-quality OA journals in AHSS (11,000), publishing in over 80 languages. Reflecting on the importance of a global perspective, Mark Huskisson recently described the wealth of OA research published on the Public Knowledge Project’s OJS platform. PKP data suggests at least 20,000 active OA journals in HSS. OJS platforms host the majority of diamond open-access journals, publishing research in 60 languages from more than 146 countries (Huskisson 2023, Public Knowledge Project 2022).

If it’s not “counted,” a journal article and its authors incur a similar sequence of negative consequences that affect books.

An individual case study illustrates the challenges: Dr. Arsim Canolli, the editor of a new Kosovar archaeology journal, Kosova Anthropologica, is committed to publishing bilingually in Albanian and English and retaining ownership within the academy. He and his fellow founders initially planned to make a PDF of the print edition available for free download from their website, a recipe for gray literature. Learning about PKP’s excellent OJS software and the requirements for DOAJ inclusion happened because of a personal connection. The experience of obtaining an ISSN was initially complex and dispiriting (e.g., his country is not part of UNESCO), although the agency came through in the end. Crossref initially quoted a prohibitive charge for membership before he learned about the Global Equitable Membership program. Without specialist advice, serendipitously obtained, would the first issue of this journal become robustly accessible through U.S. library catalogs? No. Does that lack of discoverability mean the journal is low quality? No. In sum, the challenges that an individual AHSS scholar still faces in making their research discoverable through the infrastructures we have created reflect our collective failure as information professionals to respect the culture or needs of AHSS disciplines.

Dis-counting “Non-Traditional” Formats

In the AHSS ecosystem that we as information professionals currently recognize, “The Book” and “The Journal” have long been considered the apex predators. The challenges of publishing these formats OA, especially using author-pays models, have been well reviewed (Martin Eve provides an excellent recent overview [with postprint OA online] at Eve 2022). However, books and journals have never been the most critical outputs in practice-based disciplines such as music, theater, or dance. The flat, print facsimile, electronic versions of books and journals are also increasingly peripheral to community-centered scholarship in many AHSS spaces. Exhibits, albums, videos, podcasts, and story maps are not just part of the process of doing AHSS research but also its product. When AHSS scholars prioritize the values of equity, openness, collegiality, soundness, and community, it is natural that many of these outputs are open access. None of this is new. Formal, juried exhibits open to all have been an output of the arts since at least 1769, when the first Royal Academy summer exhibition of contemporary art opened in London. Now, the exhibits are online, and the formats take advantage of digital affordances (e.g., 3D models instead of simple maps).

Pragmatically, when outputs are manifestations of the same underlying research project, OA availability facilitates a seamless connection between different outputs. Dave Hansen and collaborators at Duke University Libraries have called this “expansive digital publishing” (Hansen et al., 2018). In Figure 1 of their report, the “Expansive” team shows how two humanities research projects (“Project Vox” and “Fraud: An American History”) produce a range of outputs ranging from open educational resources, monographs, articles to exhibits. They plot these multiple formats on a spectrum, showing how they meet the needs of different audiences. Such digital scholarship outputs do not have to be open access, but they can leverage the affordances of networks such as the Internet if they are.

Making AHSS OA Scholarship Count

So what can information professionals do to make AHSS OA outputs “count”? How can we dispel the belief that humanities disciplines are slow to adopt open practices and outputs? What should we do to show the funders who care about openness that most AHSS scholars are not laggards or reactionaries but may indeed be using the affordances of digital, open dissemination more fully and authentically than many of their STEM colleagues, stuck as the latter are in economic and political structures that often reward secrecy and competition? A number of community leaders are showing the way.

• Jenny Evans at the University of Westminster is working with colleagues to reenvision repository architecture to promote portfolios of practice-based research (Evans et al., 2023). As an information professional, Evans is extending the use of existing standards, like the Research Activity Identifier (RAiD), to ensure that the works of arts researchers and practitioners are discoverable and counted on their own terms.

• Jeremy Morse at the University of Michigan uses the EPUB3 and other standards to expand what can be packaged in a “booklike” container. In deep collaboration with AHSS authors and their publishers, he facilitates the distribution of new scholarly formats, such as hip-hop albums or interactive 3D models, through familiar discovery channels (Morse, 2023; Berkery & Windhorn, 2019, p. 185).

• Katrina Fenlon at the University of Maryland works with community-centered projects in AHSS to find sustainability pathways they define rather than having these defined for them. She shows how knowledge infrastructures need to support the well-being of individuals and cohesion among communities, not just the user’s priorities (Fenlon et al., 2023).

• Karen Hanson at Portico is working with a team of information professionals (including colleagues from CLOCKSS) to embed preservability early in the construction of multimodal publications, working with publishers, authors, and platforms to adopt best practices that will ensure the longevity of new forms without sacrificing their richness (Hanson 2022).

• Javi Arias at Open Book Publishers is a technologist leading the development of the Thoth system for metadata management and distribution of OA books, with a focus on helping small and scholar-led publishers feed their works through the complex scholarly communication plumbing. The system includes a free tier (Arias et al. 2024).

In the spirit of AHSS scholarship, none of these individuals work alone. Indeed, they would be quick to defer credit to their collaborators. However, they all model a commitment to deeply embedding with scholars in their work, deeply listening to the communities at the center of scholarship, and using information science expertise to twist traditional infrastructures of exclusion to those scholars’ advantage. Their values-based work benefits everyone by advancing a more humane, collaborative, constructive ecosystem for research dissemination. As Pierre Mounier and Simon Dumas Prombault write, “It is high time to shift focus from heavily material, physics-informed infrastructure inherited from wartime Big Science and driven by supposed non-values (such as rationality, efficiency, emergency, short-term) to something else, notably for the humanities and social sciences” (Mounier & Primbault, 2023, p. 32).

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