Reader’s report: “HISTORY\nCAN BE OPEN SOURCE: DEMOCRATIC DREAMS AND THE RISE OF DIGITAL HISTORY”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recommendation: Publish\nfollowing on editor’s final suggestions<\/p>\n\n\n\n
September 21, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This report is from the pen\n(i.e., laptop) of the “open access maximalist” of the first round of\nreviews. My initial reservation remains:\nthis submission begins by including historical scholarship in its discussion\nbut concludes with public-facing websites and the superb textbook that the\nauthors themselves have edited and overseen. \nIf those are the central examples, no one would disagree that\n“history can be open source.” \nYet then history journals are effectively removed from the discussion\nalthough they are major purveyors of historical scholarship. A dimmer view of access to them is possible:\nreaders, authors, and editors (in the sense of a journal editor but also a copy\neditor and a fact checker) are all integrated into a financial system that is\nhardly democratic. We still need a\nreckoning of the costs involved in someone reading an article, an author\npublishing and article, and a variety of editors improving an author’s\nwork. I remain disappointed that this\nissue is not even on the table in this submission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said, this is a very good\nsubmission that wears its political heart on its sleeve and that traces a\nsinuous path of digital history from its beginnings in the early phases of\ncomputer applications in historical scholarship through different phases of\nhigher education in the last half century to The American Yawp<\/em> and current projects that aim for both\nmethodological sophistication and engagement outside the historians’\nprofession. It serves well as an\nintellectual autobiography of The American\nYawp<\/em>. The Yawp<\/em> is so good that an article in the AHR<\/em> seems appropriate as a parallel to its growing use in higher\neducation. I myself have used it in two\ndifferent courses, one a survey, the other a seminar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, this submission does a\ngood job of clarifying the issues involved in public outreach for historians\ntoday. Some scholars pursue arcane\ntopics. Others develop topics with much\npotential for public interest. Many of\nus could straddle both worlds if we understood better how to do that. The discussion beginning at paragraph 42\nelucidates these issues very well by bringing forward an number of examples,\nand it should be very helpful for new and established authors who are thinking\nabout greater outreach for their own work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reader’s report: “HISTORY CAN BE OPEN SOURCE: DEMOCRATIC DREAMS AND THE RISE OF DIGITAL HISTORY” Recommendation: Publish following on editor’s final suggestions September 21, 2020 This report is from the pen (i.e., laptop) of the “open access maximalist” of the first round of reviews. My initial reservation remains: this submission begins by including historical scholarship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":11,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-126","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/126\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}