Following a CHR Book Launch during which Scott Berg (English) spoke with Stephen Robertson (History/Art History) about his new digital monograph, Alok Yadav (English) and Stephen Robertson again touched base about the work.
AY: Your digital monograph, Harlem in Disorder (2024), differs from traditional monographs in two palpable respects: first, it’s a digital project, rather than a traditional book, and, secondly, it’s been published by Stanford University Press as an open access work, rather than a traditional non-open access work. During the CHR Book Launch discussion of Harlem in Disorder with Scott Berg of the English department, there was a lot of discussion of the digital monograph aspect of this work; in this follow-up discussion, we’d like to have you discuss the open-access aspect of the work.
It seems that from your initial conception of Harlem in Disorder, you knew that you wanted to produce some kind of digital monograph and that this fact shaped your work on the project throughout.
When and how did the open-access feature of the project come into view and how central has it been to your sense of the work, either prospectively as you were working on the project or, retrospectively, now that it is, in fact, published as an open-access work?
SR: As Harlem in Disorder was from its conception an online only project, I expected it to be open access. Scholars working in the digital humanities share a commitment to making material freely available online that harks back to the original vision of the internet as a means of increasing access – as quaint as that seems in an era when we pay for so much online content. Making my research available to others was the reason for creating my first online project, Digital Harlem. When I became director of RRCHNM here at GMU the center’s mission helped me articulate what was at stake in that decision: democratizing history, by incorporating multiple voices, reaching diverse audiences, and encouraging popular participation in presenting and preserving the past (All RRCHNM’s grant-funded projects are freely available). In addition, as the information landscape evolves in the digital age, if we do not make our scholarship available we will be left out of the conversation. This is only becoming more important as publishers license our research for use training AI, which will then deliver it potentially distorted and certainly without attribution of any kind (Ithaka recently launched a tracker for these licensing deals.
When I submitted my project for consideration for the Digital Projects series at Stanford University Press, I knew its earlier publications were open access. I had assumed that was part of how the series was conceived, but I’ve since learned that the press did explore whether they could charge for access but abandoned that idea as both impractical and at odds with what authors wanted. Perhaps because it was not part of their original plans, Stanford University Press had not distributed the series as open access publications until I prompted them to a few weeks ago. The WorldCat entries are now updated to identify the projects in the series as open access publications. The press also submitted them to the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). As a result, Harlem in Disorder is now in the catalogs of over 100 hundred academic libraries that draw on that database.
AY: “Open access” can mean different things, both in terms of what is required to enable the work to be made available in an open access format (e.g., fees or subventions) and what kinds of access to and uses (or re-uses) of the work are licensed of the published work (e.g., through a Creative Commons license). Can you say a little about how these issues were worked out in relation to Harlem in Disorder?
SR: A large grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the Digital Projects series at Stanford University Press. While I do not think that open access publication was a deliverable of the grant, I assume the funding mitigated the need for fees or subventions.
As is the case with any academic monograph, the publisher holds the copyright, so Stanford University Press determined the license. However, staff at the press did have some difficulty in registering the copyright of the first digital project back in 2018, as the Copyright office required the content of the web site be submitted as PDF files. The CC license they chose is the option typically used in the digital humanities and would also have been my choice: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. It requires that any reproduced content be attributed, not used for commercial purposes and not transformed or remixed in any way. That approach maximizes access while ensuring the integrity of the publication as is necessary in the case of scholarship.
AY: Have you published other work in open-access formats and what kind of role does open access play in your thinking about your own future work or, more generally, in your thinking about scholarship in your discipline?
SR: All of my digital projects are available open access: in addition to Digital Harlem, that includes a blog about that project, a site of published journal articles annotated by their authors to highlight the use of digital methods to make historical arguments, and a professional development curriculum introduces public librarians to historical research methods and digital history skills that can be shared with patrons to help them do local history, and multiple course web sites.
My most recent article, in History and Theory, was published open access thanks to an agreement between the publisher, Wiley, and VIVA, a consortium of Virginia’s academic libraries of which GMU is a member. If you’re publishing in a journal owned by a large publisher, it’s worth pushing to find out if similar OA are available.
When I’m not able to publish articles OA, I try to make copies available in the GMU institutional repository. Depending on the journal, you can put a post print version of an article (the final version submitted by the author, after review and revision, but before copyediting) in a repository 12-24 months after its publication.
Options for OA book publishing are still more limited, but as electronic versions of books become a standard format the possibility exists to make them freely available rather than only by subscription in JSTOR, EBSCO etc. To facilitate that approach, two open-source electronic book platforms have been developed with support from the Mellon Foundation: Manifold and Fulcrum. Using Manifold, the University of Minnesota Press, for example, publishes open access online titles alongside selling paperback editions. I hope to have that option when I publish my next book. At the same time, I plan to continue to spend some of my time on digital scholarship in part because I can make it freely available.
October 18, 2024