{"id":43,"date":"2020-02-02T19:21:59","date_gmt":"2020-02-02T19:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/?page_id=43"},"modified":"2020-04-13T00:51:47","modified_gmt":"2020-04-13T00:51:47","slug":"readers-report-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/readers-report-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader’s Report #2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

*Note: The period for public comment ended April 10, 2020.*<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reader’s report: “History Can<\/em> Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommendation: Revise and\nresubmit<\/p>\n\n\n\n

March 27, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an account of the early years\nof digital history and digital humanities, this submission works very well. The\npoint is well made\u2014and could be made more often and more sharply\u2014that the\ndemocratic aspirations of those working in digital scholarship and digital\npedagogy have usually been uneven and problematic. For instance,\n“democracy as access” is not only a very thin definition of democracy\nbut also suggests a confusion in peoples’ minds that broader access must be\nmore democratic. And democratizing the subject matter of historians and\nhumanists has by no means democratized “history” in the sense of the\nhistorical profession. James Kloppenberg is used to make the point that\ndemocracy is an ever-receding goal, but the authors do not seem to see that as\na problem that demands that we propose solutions. This reader’s view is the\nopposite, leading to a criticism of the submission, two paragraphs below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One strong point of the\nsubmission is that it considers ethical issues beyond those inherent in open\naccess itself\u2014democracy in addition to <\/em>open\naccess. By way of contrast, Martin Paul Eve is quoted and cited throughout the\nsubmission. Eve expresses a level of technological sophistication that the\nauthors seem to lack, yet, to my knowledge, he has not asked questions more\nsearching than how publications can be open access. The Open Library of the\nHumanities, with which he is identified, is an amazing achievement, but he has\nnot addressed the relationship between democracy and open access. A recent\narticle by Eve and Paula Clemente Vega and Caroline Vega, “Lessons from\nthe Open Library of the Humanities,” Liber\nQuarterly<\/em> 30:1 (2020): 1\u201318, covers the challenges of funding open access\nand describes the labor that has gone into OLH. This article evinces\ntechnological and financial savvy far beyond that of the current submission,\nyet it never enters the ethical territory in which the authors want to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This criticism alluded to above\nis that the authors bundle together a variety of internet-based resources, then\nfocus at the end of their essay on a very good on-line textbook. Their bundling\nimpulse, which seems to suggest their own democratic pro-access leanings, is\ncorrect. These resources do share a family resemblance and do belong together:\n(1) primary sources published on the internet, (2) on-line editions of a number\nof works or collections, (3) open access monographs, (4) open access journal\narticles, and (5) OER textbooks. The problem here is the authors fail to\nacknowledge that other historians and humanists understand open access very\ndifferently when it comes to the various resources in that list. In this, the\nauthors are side-stepping any problems and seem to be evading a major problem\nin their own academic area. A revision of this essay should address this. It is\nquite possible, for instance, for historians to welcome OER textbooks yet\ndenounce a requirement for open access journal articles. The authors’ title,\n“History Can<\/em> Be Open Source:\nDemocratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History,” does not fit the\nsubmission very well as long as this problem remains unaddressed. I would like\nto outline one way the problem can be addressed, not to corral the authors into\na solution but to suggest the challenge of identifying a solution that this\nsubmission requires but actually evades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concern with democracy that\nmotivated much early digital history and digital humanities has evolved into an\ninsistence, growing little by little, that publicly-funded scholarly work be\nfor the public good. This evolution brings its own definitional problems, of\ncourse, but it has clarified the premise that if one’s work as a scholar is\nsupported by public funds then the results of that work should be accessible to\nthe public as a part of scholars’ and presses’ role in serving the public that\npays their bills. This is an axiom of the European Plan S. It has been sharply\ncritiqued by those who believe that editors and copyeditors would lose their\nsource of compensation under Plan S. Without rehearsing the anti-Plan-S\nargument here, let it suffice to say in response the source of compensation,\nlike indeed often that of the labor of editors and copyeditors is public funds,\nso that the same pro-open-access arguments that are made about scholars apply\nequally to editors and copyeditors. Many of those rebuffing open access are\nthemselves paid from public monies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Money then must be addressed.\nThe authors of the submission note, correctly, that historians are not used to\npaying publishing fees. The figure they mention ($600\u2013700) seems quite low\u2014though\nbless their hearts for trying to save historians money. Here I would like to\noffer a counterargument. Historians and humanists could get used to paying\npublishing fees as a good investment. A journal article is a plus for tenure\nand promotion. Many historians and humanists already pay more than $700 of\ntheir own money on conference travel each year. Why not redirect that to a\npublishing fee when needed? Moreover, I want to push this point further.\nAuthors’ publishing is already monetized but the figures are hidden. Some\nscholars received funding from their institutions or other organizations for\ntravel, research, graduate assistants, and the like; most do not received such\nfunding. If publication required a statement of funding sources\u2014and if authors\nresponded honestly\u2014then we would have a clear picture of the money undergirding\nhistorians’ publications. Of course, much of that money, even at private\ninstitutions, has public sources. One might think that many poorly compensated\nhistorians, who are also those unlikely to publish in high-profile journals,\nwould welcome such a picture as a first step in a process of democratizing the\nprofession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eve, Vega, and Edwards argue for\na different funding model. Their argument seems convincing\u2014and their model seems\nto have worked so far\u2014but once again it is purely financial and it never\naddresses ethics, democracy, or the public good, unless one assumes that those\nare all subsumed into open access itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We should start taking first\nsteps. The authors write about neoliberalism as though it were a new force in\nthe historical profession, but it has been neoliberal for decades. The rate of\ngain of the economic value of a publication in a journal like the AHR<\/em>, just like that of salaries of\nhistorians in, say, the top 200 institutions, is higher than that of the\ncompensation of historians at large and than that of per-student expenditures\nfor education in history courses in most institutions. Neoliberalism is already\nhere in the profession, along with a poor distribution of public funds. It\nseems hard to avoid the conclusion that public funds are being used to promote\nthe private good of a small number of historians and, at best, their students.\nIf we construe the public as all students in history courses, it seems evident\nthat most pay in more than they get out. They and their instructors are outside\nthe benefits of neoliberalism. Once again, critics of Plan S sometimes claim\nthat open access would mean uneven access to publishing opportunities\u2014implying\nthat benefits would be unequally distributed\u2014but we were there long before Plan\nS was conceived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this review, I am using the\nword “problem” often enough, yet if we consider the vast number of\ncontingent, adjunct, part-time, unemployed, and underemployed historians and\nother scholars\u2014all of them in those states while benefits accrue increasingly\nto the top of the profession\u2014”crisis” is a more appropriate term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open access would be a revolution in historical scholarship. By combining a variety of open resources, the authors give too much cover to lukewarm moderates who will praise the American Yawp<\/em> while impeding open access itself. The COVID19 pandemic has shown us that publicly funded research and scholarship can be made open: much of the relevant work has been made open for researchers to use with public health as their goal. Why not historical journals? I would like the authors to recognize that there is a problem in historical publication and, even if they have no solution to propose, not to design a landscape that allows people to walk around the problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*Note: The period for public comment ended April 10, 2020.* Reader’s report: “History Can Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History” Recommendation: Revise and resubmit March 27, 2020 As an account of the early years of digital history and digital humanities, this submission works very well. The point is well made\u2014and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-43","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/43","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=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/43\/revisions\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}