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Social Sciences and Humanities Publishing and the Digital ‘Revolution’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2011

Jean Kempf
Jean Kempf*
Affiliation:
Université Lumière Lyon 2, 86, rue Pasteur, F-69007 Lyon, France. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article argues that the digital ‘revolution’ may turn out to be a true revolution for humanities and social sciences scholars, but not for the reasons usually brought forth in academic debates. Digital humanities is a way of returning to the intellectual fundamentals of the scholarly profession and of deeply changing the notion of academic community as well as that of reward and even authorship. This means not focusing on the new technical possibilities offered by the electronic format, which do not necessarily produce better science, but actually inventing a (new) political economy of social and human sciences. Scholars and academics should reinvent their daily practice in order to make true again the ideal of their profession: understanding societies in order to help them become more human.

Type
Focus: Risks of the Intellectual Life Guest Editor: Cinzia Ferrini
Information
European Review , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , 31 May 2011 , pp. 469 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2011

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References

Notes and References

1. Even a brief look at specialized blogs such as Publishing Trends or homo-numericus.net (held by two French specialists of electronic publishing) will show that there is no dearth of that kind of prophetic material. It is now, for a large part, present in specialized publications or in various studies and reports ordered by governments and funding agencies, and conducted by various bodies. In the book publications on ‘the future of the book’, however, a historical trend can be seen, with a surge of interrogations that seems to have taken place in the mid 1990s, followed by a 10-year gap, with a new peak of publication starting in the mid 2000s. For a list of recent relevant publications proposing various analyses and predictions, see the selected bibliography at the end of this article.Google Scholar
2. As the studies that have been conducted by the OAPEN team (of which I am fortunate to be a member) as well as by others show, there is no significant evidence to substantiate any potential effect of digital information on the publishing world. There are only scenarios based on ‘ideological’ decisions (i.e. based on ideas and programs) and a great dose of positive thinking on the part of the market evangelists who believe in a possible generation of revenues. My contention here is that as our whole economy is shifting (see Rifkin, J. (2000) The Age Of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience (New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam)), that of the dissemination of research cannot but change its economic model radically, abandoning the traditional selling of a product for other types of exchanges: selling of a service or even more the transformation of goods into service and its funding not by customers but by all (i.e. taxes).Google Scholar
3.Darnton, R. (2009) The Case for Books: Past, Present, Future (New York: PublicAffairs).Google Scholar
4.Darnton, R. (1999) The new age of the book. The New York Review of Books, 18 March (http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html).Google Scholar
5. Project Gutenberg-e (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/) was an offshoot of Columbia University Press in collaboration with the American Historical Association (AHA), created with support of the Mellon foundation in 1998–2000. It aimed at publishing the best history dissertations chosen by the AHA, greatly enriched with audio and visual documents. The project has so far published 35 books. Although it seems dormant at the moment, it remains to this day the most accomplished of this type of approach to the scholarly monograph on line.Google Scholar
6.Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
7. As for the likes of Larry Lessig or Yochai Benkler, they are more concerned with a philosophy of the superstructure than with the epistemology of the sciences.Google Scholar
8.http://www.futureofthebook.org/.Google Scholar
9. I do not write here about other publishing fields in which OA might prove to be counterproductive (or not) as I do not know them well enough to pass any substantiated judgements. As in many instances, one should be extremely careful in (cultural) history and sociology, to differentiate between objects (books, photographs, etc) and practices or functions (inform, entertain, create, convince, etc).Google Scholar
10. Open access literature can be simply defined as ‘digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.’ (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm). It is conditioned by two factors: a technical base, the internet, and a legal/moral base, the consent of the author or copyright-holder. See http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.Google Scholar
11. See Cummings, A. M. (1992) University Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Washington, DC: Publications of the Associations of Research Libraries, November) (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED371758); and The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing, University of Waterloo, Canada, Scholarly Societies Project (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/society/crisis.html).Google Scholar
12. One should note how the profession of ‘risk manager’ has taken off in finance, with the splendid results in forward thinking that we have been able to witness in the past few years.Google Scholar
13.Malcolm, N. (1996) Drowning in a sea of words. The Independent on Sunday, 21 July, p. 21.Google Scholar
14. In the context of preservation, fixity and immutability is on the contrary an asset. It is highly telling that in 1996 one analyst could write: ‘Paper journals will have to convert to electronic publication or disappear. The role of paper is likely to be limited to temporary uses, and archival storage will be electronic.’ (Odlyzko, A. M. (1994) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals. Journal of Universal Computing, DOI: 10.3217/jucs-000-00-0003.) We now seem to have somewhat reversed the focus, as long-term preservation of digital material seems much more difficult and risky than that of paper, or at least faces huge challenges that no one has solved so far, and which, once again, are based on modelling and projections rather than experience. See for instance a most interesting blog on the subject: ‘Alan's notes and thoughts on digital preservation’ (http://alanake.wordpress.com/). Also the professional sites of the Digital Library Federation (http://www.diglib.org/), the INTERpares Project (http://www.interpares.org/) in Canada or Digital Preservation Europe (http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/).Google Scholar
15. Technophiliacs speak of ‘fluidity’ or ‘liquidity’, but the word ‘flexible’ seems to me perfectly operative.Google Scholar
16. As Roger Chartier, among others, argues in Chartier, R. (1993) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity).Google Scholar
17. Pierre Bourdieu, in texts such as Bourdieu, P. (1994) Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l'action (Paris: Seuil), has quite cogently theorized the position of the researcher and his/her relationship to his/her object.Google Scholar
18. Strictly speaking there are two types of open ‘access’. The self-archiving by their authors of publications, which are not published in open access, and not even digitally, is called ‘green open access’ or ‘the green road’. The other type of OA, called ‘gold OA’, is native open access, i.e. the publishing of texts directly accessible, freely, and with little or no restrictions. Although OA fans keep repeating that the two roads are complementary, it is clear that one (the green road) is merely a way of by-passing the limitations of both the printed dissemination and of the publishing market, while the other (the gold road) is a true paradigm change. One wonders how the free distribution of content can long coexist with a pay distribution of the same content without leading to a complete revision of the economic model.Google Scholar
19. See OAPEN reports: ‘Digital Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Report on User Needs’ (January 2010) by Janneke Adema and Paul Rutten; and ‘Overview of Open Access Business Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences’ (February 2010), by Janneke Adema (June 2010), both available on the OAPEN site (http://oapen.org/).Google Scholar
20. One easily agrees, especially since the last economic crisis, that the ‘market’ is neither virtuous, nor wise, but simply amoral. And concurrently it is not difficult to subscribe to the point of view that serving the community is not a licence for irresponsible behaviour, as liberals as well as populists would have us believe.Google Scholar
21. For practical examples of ‘new books’, see The Institute for the Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/), click on ‘Projects’.Google Scholar
22. See Creative Commons at http://creativecommons.org/ and an example of licence to publish at http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/Google Scholar

Selected Bibliography

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Birkerts, S. (1994, 1995) The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine).Google Scholar
Borgman, C. L. (2000) From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chartier, R. (1993) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Librairies in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity).Google Scholar
Cummings, A. M. (1992) University Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, (Washington, DC: Publications of the Associations of Research Libraries, November).Google Scholar
Darnton, R. (1999) The new age of the book. The New York Review of Books, 18 March.Google Scholar
Darnton, R. (2009) The Case for Books: Past, Present, Future (New York: PublicAffairs).Google Scholar
Gomez, J. (2008) Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age (London, New York: Macmillan).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hillesund, T. (2010) Digital reading spaces: how expert readers handle books, the web and electronic paper. First Monday, web.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Le, R. É. and Lafrance, J.-P. (2008) La Bataille de l'imprimé à l’ère du papier électronique (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal)Google Scholar
Lessig, L. (2001) The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, 1st edn (New York: Random House).Google Scholar
Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press).Google Scholar
Lessig, L. (2006) Code: Version 2.0, 2nd edn (New York: Basic Books)Google Scholar
Lessig, L. (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeely, I. F. and Wolverton, L. (2008) Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet, 1st edn (New York: W.W. Norton).Google Scholar
OAPEN (2010) Digital Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Report on User Needs (January) by J. Adema and P. Rutten. Available at http://oapen.org/Google Scholar
OAPEN (2010) Overview of Open Access Business Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences (February), by J. Adema. Available at http://oapen.org/Google Scholar
Odlyzko, A. M. (1994) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 3, 52. Web.Google Scholar
Sapiro, G. (2009) Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Paris: Nouveau monde éd.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willinsky, J. (2006) The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).Google Scholar