When I started teaching as an adjunct, it didn’t matter that the pay was atrocious – I suddenly had access to scholarly journals! That was worth its weight in gold. As a practitioner, I had no access to the latest conversations or research in my field – I had to piece together memberships with different academic associations to get regular access to key journals in sociology, political science, and international development practice. Many of my colleagues did without and worked with grey literature. This week’s readings on copyright and open access publishing were infuriating and validated my experience over the past 10 years. The system is broken if the vast majority of profits are made by journal clearinghouses rather than the authors themselves, and if knowledge produced with taxpayer dollars is not available to those taxpayers without an additional exorbitant infusion of cash. It results in knowledge bottlenecks and inexcusable underuse of human effort and learning. Nick Shockley and Jonathan Eisen’s “Open Access Explained!” video was a fantastic explainer (and also open source!) that didn’t just critique the system but sought to understand root issues and make room for experiments in collaboration with publishers. That seems like the right way to go. The Vox article “The War to Free Science” provided some solutions, albeit not always collaborative. A University of Montreal professor left with the whole editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics and started a new open access journal through MIT Press call Quantitative Science Studies. Globally, students are directed by professors and peers to pre-prints and pirating sites like Sci-Hub to find free copies of research. At some point the publishing model will need to adapt.
On the digital humanities project side, our project team is moving forward with a collaboration with GMU’s Center for Mason Legacies, building on what they have already done on Tinner Hill. As we conduct our Environmental Scan, it was surprising to see how difficult it was to find digital exhibits online. It was helpful to be able to start with a handful of projects in the syllabus. Many of them were collaborations with the public and asked individuals to send in their stories, pictures, videos, and other contributions on important moments in US history, like 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought about the backend work that goes into managing this kind of nation-wide collaboration with individual contributors – from public outreach to data management, quality control, dissemination, public use. It was also interesting to see how each project managed copyrights. The 9/11 archive and Hurricane Katrina and Rita Digital Memory Bank, for example, give original contributors copyright over all materials in the collections. My recent experience with oral history collections has been that institutions require copyright over all materials. I understand why institutions would want to retain copyright – it’s easier to use the materials and make them available in a timely way. But there are other options, as seen in the 9/11 and Katrina/Rita archives. The Oral History Association has some helpful “guidelines for social justice oral history work” that speak to these options.
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