We have already heard much from our primary speakers and in David Whitehead's response to them that is substantive and provocative, so I will respond only very briefly, in the hope that we will all still have some time left afterwards for some open discussion.
It seems to me that our first and third talks tonight point in two somewhat different directions, but that Peter Suber's introduction to Open Access might bridge them in certain ways. The History e-Book project takes its place along a continuum with several alternative models that aim to replace (or supplement) print versions of traditional scholarly forms, especially the journal article and the monograph, with more widely available electronic versions of those same scholarly products. With improved access and convenience come significant (but not unanswerable) questions about which financial and technical and institutional practices may best foster long-term archivability and stability. These digitization projects are already succeeding (in more than one form), and as they succeed they will provide far into the future a strong continuity with the traditional methods of scholarship in which we have all been trained: it is clear that books and articles aren't going away in our lifetimes, even as we gradually cease gaining access to them on a physical shelf somewhere. Our community will continue to need, and to produce, those traditional forms in which to put forward arguments, test theses, establish narratives, and engage the work of other scholars in new acts of creative synthesis and criticism.
But we ought not stop within those traditional boundaries as we define the nature of scholarly praxis, nor should we limit ourselves to a vision of the future that looks for the most part like what already exists. We now have at our fingertips powerful new tools for working within a nearly ubiquitous technical infrastructure so full of possibilities we literally don't yet know what do with it, especially in the humanities. And if universities and scholarly societies cannot bring themselves to encourage and nurture those faculty who wish to explore the edge, even when they at times fail or falter in what they are trying to do, then advances in our understanding about the most effective and worthwhile uses of information technology in the academic setting will be a very long time coming. Jeff Rydberg-Cox's presentation on academic credentialling as it relates to innovative work in scholarly communication has brought out many of the key issues nicely. He and his poll results have shown that the mere fact that an otherwise conventional article or book gets published in a digital format now seems unlikely to present a big problem for the author's career, as long as the scholarship and its publication venue appear to meet certain standards of quality and credibility. Anything else would be absurd. But what about the innovators? What about those who wish to engage in efforts to build new kinds of digital libraries, or experiment with alternative models of scholarly review, or reach new audiences with technology-mediated materials? Their work is inevitably both cross-disciplinary and collaborative, and therefore inherently harder to assess, but no one is asking for a blank check. Jeff Rydberg-Cox is right to say that good e-projects should not only “ask and answer interesting research questions,” but also “push the boundaries of what we can do” and “change the expectations of how we work together.” All three of these requirements typically call for a secondary, or meta-, publication, to explain what is going on in a given project, i.e. what went into the decisions about how to proceed. In other words, those scholars who toil in the electronic vineyard often perform a double duty: they work to create new forms (e.g. a word collocation tool, or a new system for collaborative translation and annotation) and they must then describe that work in some additional publication. But this state of affairs is by no means unfair or even undesirable: on the contrary it presents a valuable opportunity to argue for (and against) particular methods, and thus continually to widen the circle of those who understand and acknowledge best practices in this field.
This theme of widening the circle brings me back to Peter Suber's presentation on Open Access, which I said earlier seems to me to bridge the other two presentations. He says: "“hen we consent to open access, we increase the size of our audience and the impact of our work; . . . we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.” This is one of those points that seems glaringly obvious to many of us, but nonetheless we are still a long way from seeing its full acceptance on the practical level. In fact we can be certain that there is much more demand even for somewhat esoteric scholarly literature in the humanities than most people realize. The results of the older digitization projects now in existence continue to make this point clear, and the pressure for Open Access will only continue to grow, until -- I hope -- it is simply a given. In the last year or so I have come to believe that as time goes by we will also more and more acknowledge a strong connection between Open Access to content (of a sort that goes well beyond the metadata sharing enabled by the OAI), and Open Access to the technologies used in computational manipulations and presentation of that content. But that is a topic that needs more time. I think I should stop right here and thank all of our participants for their terrific contributions to this panel. Above all, thanks to Barbara McManus, who has been a tireless and truly inspiring advocate for the connection between inclusivity and innovation for so many years now.
Ross Scaife
Associate Professor of Classics, University of Kentucky
Founder and Coeditor of The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities
Cofounder and Editor of Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World
scaife@uky.edu
Return to Electronic Publication and the Classics Profession
May 2004