Abstract
Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. Cambridge University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012. From disciplinary repositories such as arXiv to publishers such as the Public Library of Science, open access is often associated with scientific research. But, as Martin Paul Eve notes in his new book Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge UP, 2014), the humanities as well as science can benefit from free access to scholarly literature and the ‘removal of permission barriers' (p. 2). Indeed, journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly and platforms such as NINES demonstrate the applicability of open access to the humanities, and humanities scholars such as Peter Suber have made important contributions to the open access movement. Yet many humanities scholars have not embraced open access, suspecting that it means less prestige. In addition, some believe that open access must necessarily be funded through article and book processing charges, which they fear distort the publication process and impede academic freedom. But open access can widen access to scholarly publications, deepen their impact, and support text mining and other (digital) humanities work—without compromising quality or depending upon an author-pays model. With this book, Eve offers a nuanced exploration of factors informing attitudes toward and practices of open access in the humanities. Eve is well qualified to author such a work, since he is a founder and co-director of the Open Library of Humanities, serves on the steering committee for JISC's OAPEN-UK project and other open access initiatives, and has a Ph.D. in English. As Eve points out, open access in the humanities and in the sciences are not inherently different, but research cultures do differ. Taking a humanities perspective means paying special attention to the complexities of monograph publishing, … lspiro{at}rice.edu
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