Yesterday I heard Peter Suber talk at Williams College, as part of the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences colloquium series. Peter Suber has written extensively on open access and its future, which is a terribly important issue for academics today. It’s important for us as authors who sign over rights to our work when we publish, but it’s also important for us as educators and scholars who want to see our work broadly disseminated. This becomes even more important as various forms of attacks are leveled against the humanities and social sciences — critiques on the relevance and importance of the humanities and social sciences (some fields more than others), which extends to financial and institutional support for our work. I was particularly compelled by the way Suber described authors as custodians of their work, work that is meaningful on multiple levels — authors as individuals who produce scholarship; authors as contributors to broader intellectual, creative communities. My own take is that we desperately need to rethink and reconceptualize authorship and scholarly production, especially as modes of production shift. I’m sure there are many good people working on this now and I just need to find them. Approaching all this in a different way, this week I’m studying the Author Addendum provided by SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with the aim of circulating to others.
Anyway, definitely check out Suber’s work and stay tuned for more writing on open access and emerging digital communities.
