Open Access Week
In my capacity as Co-Director for the Open Library of Humanities publishing project I was asked to give several talks around Open Access Week 2013. These included the following:
- "Non-traditional research outputs" (invited lecture as part of a workshop on intellectual property), 12th October 2013, CREATe, University of Glasgow
- "Open Access: Understanding the New Environment," 23rd October 2013, University of Kent
- "What Does Open Access Mean for the Humanities?" invited talk at "Open Access Futures in the Humanities & Social Sciences" conference organised by SAGE and the LSE in association with the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences, Senate House London, 24th October 2013 (info & bookings available here)
- "How can existing OA Models work for Humanities and Social Sciences publishing?" invited talk at "Open Access Realities: Global Experiences of Implementing OA" conference of the UKSG, Institute of Physics London, 14th November 2013 (programme here and click here to view slides from this talk)
I was delighted to receive a very warm reception at each event and to discover the extent of interest in open access publishing in the humanities, possible funding and business models, and questions arising from the challenges of addressing internationalisation in open access publishing (including raising awareness of the large number of already existing OA journals outside of Europe and North America, issues of translation, indexing and academic prestige).
The talks also allowed me to think in more detail about the way in which my own editorial experience of running the open access short-form, wordpress-run journal Alluvium and campaining for open access with the OLH project are borrowing from methods and practices in the sciences, where OA publishing has a longer history. In these talks, therefore, I contextualise humanities opportunities within a broader ambit of academic gift culture, a tradition of academic hacking since the 1960s, and a DIY ethos of academic praxis.
You can see my talk at the SAGE/LSE conference here (time signature: 34 mins, 11 secs) and my talk at the UKSG conference here.
Image by biblioteekje under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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