Liberal Arts Campuses Lead in Open Scholarship, Open Access

Professor Claire Strom, Rollins College, and University Librarian Diane Graves, Trinity College, lead the Open Access workshop at NITLE Camp (June 2010, Depauw University)

A major humanities journal recently conducted a successful trial of open source scholarly review, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.   It’s a fascinating case of open scholarship and open access, areas where liberal arts faculty and campuses are emerging as innovators.

Shakespeare Quarterly opened its forthcoming Winter 2010 special issue, “Shakespeare and New Media”, to a form of crowdsourced peer review.  The journal used the Commentpress blog software to organize feedback (archived here).

Authors could opt to post drafts of their articles online, open them up for anyone to comment on, and then revise accordingly. The editors would make the final call about what to publish (hence the “partially open” label).

Shakespeare Quarterly at CommentPress

So commentators posted comments to that Web platform, with their identities accessible, as opposed to sending in comments to an editor.  SQ editors reserved the final right of publishing judgment, much like crowdsourcing project organizers often do.

The process seems to have worked.  Authors received useful feedback, then revised their articles, yielding an improved issue overall.  Reviewers spent more time on the process, which might be a result of the newness of the thing.  The public nature of review might also have caused reviewers to write more, as they expected a larger number of readers, aware of the authors’ identities.

“It was on the whole a successful experiment,” said Martin Mueller, a professor of English and classics at Northwestern University, who took part as a reviewer.

[Michael Witmore] and his co-author “got some terrific ideas and some citations” … “It produced a more interesting paper.”

“the results were terrific”… “It seemed more like a dialogue.”

Bryn Mawr College English professor Katherine Rowe edited the volume.  Her scholarly work on digital media played a role in winning that position:

She and the editorial board decided that the issue’s new-media theme offered a chance to investigate how scholarly authority works in a networked environment.

Another scholar who is emerging as a leader in the field of new media, Pomona College associate professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick outlined a future model of open source peer review when addressing this year’s NITLE Summit.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona) discusses open scholarship with Barron Koralesky (Macalester) and Carol Long (SUNY Geneseo)

Fitzpatrick’s current research about peer review in the social media age provides a rich framework for exploring how scholarly publication might adapt to new opportunities.  Fitzpatrick also helps lead the MediaCommons project, which explores issues of academic information and technology more generally, and which served as the environment for the open peer review experiment by the Shakespeare Quarterly

In addition to these steps scholars are taking into new territory, institutions in the liberal arts sector have been in the vanguard of campuses declaring their support for producing open access scholarly content.  Trinity University, Rollins College, and Oberlin College have each adopted policies on this score. Faculty leaders from two of these three pioneering campuses – Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University, and Claire Strom, professor of history at Rollins College – led the workshop “Introduction to Open Access” at NITLE Camp this June.  This workshop addressed both the evangelism and implications of adopting such a policy.

Campuses must also consider not only if, but how to implement open access.  Earlier this year, participants in NITLE’s videoconference session about open access in liberal education argued that differences in institutional approaches to openly providing scholarly content reflect unique campus cultures.  For example, some campuses maintain a local repository to host faculty content, some share repositories, and others include both faculty- and student-produced research.

On yet another level, some on liberal arts campuses see open scholarship as drawing on the liberal arts tradition of community engagement.  Barbara Fister (Gustavus Adolphus) argues that open scholarship is a solution to a publication culture which has become too isolated.

We value esoteric expertise to the extent that we declare ourselves incompetent to judge our colleagues’ work; instead, we outsource promotion and tenure to publishers, whose imprimatur is used to substitute for our judgment. Libraries are supposed to foot the bill, whether anyone wants to read this stuff or not. We could be doing something more productive, like enriching people’s lives or setting people’s imaginations on fire, but we’ve let ourselves define the word “productive” in very narrow and oversimplified quantifiable terms…

If we want our scholarship to make a difference (other than to our own careers) open access is so important.

What’s next after Shakespeare Quarterly’s pilot experiment?  More such issues are being planned, according to a recent blog post by Fitzpatrick.

And what’s next for your campus on this issue? Are faculty or information professional staff exploring such new platforms for open scholarship? Is open access growing as a campus interest or standard? Let us know in comments!

Selected NITLE work on open content, open access, and open scholarship:

• Introduction to Open Access, workshop at NITLE Camp in June
• Open Content By Any Other Name, Techne post
• No Longer a Parlor Conversation, ” “
• Academics and social media: a parallel world of open content, ” “
• Open Notebook Science, ” “
• Prediction markets on one open content project, the Open Courseware Consortium, and the number of open access journals
• A MIV session on open content and access, from this February

Coming up soon at Techne: a post on open scholarship and digital humanities.