Conversation with two religious studies scholars on committee at Open Library of Humanities

The other day I checked-in on developments over at Open Library of Humanities. As I reported earlier here and here, the idea for this very interesting project sprang from a number of often asked questions: Why hasn’t anyone created an analog to the Public Library of Science (PLOS)—meaning, a broad-based, not-for-profit organization dedicated to publishing open access research—for the Humanities? What would it take—meaning, at least, editorial and technical infrastructure, sustainable funding, and broad-based scholarly support—to create such a PLOS analog for the Humanities? Given our deep and long-standing scholarly communication traditions, would such an approach—meaning, in particular, developing a multi-disciplinary “mega-journal” like PLOS ONE—even work in the Humanities?

OLH’s advisory committee structure appears to be in place. There are still numerous details to work out, but posted minutes from recent meetings of two of the committees (Academic Steering & Advocacy and LibTech) suggest conceptual outlines of the OLH platform are beginning to take shape. Summarized from the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee meeting minutes of February 25, 2013: “The committee overwhelmingly favoured, with some caveats, a mega-journal structure, but one which also had the option to present as a ‘traditional’ journal through overlay function.” “Overlay journals” are created by curating and filtering subject-specific content pulled from submissions to the central mega-journal platform, branded to “give the appearance, and benefits, of more localised journals.”

Somewhat surprised but very proud: Religious Studies scholars well-represented on OLH committees

As I looked over the lists of assembled OLH committee members, I was somewhat surprised but also very proud to discover representation from not just one (if even one) but three Religious Studies scholars. Peter Webster (an independent historian of religion in twentieth century Britain, whose day job is at the British Library) and Steven Engler (Professor of Religious Studies at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada) are members on the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee. Justin Meggitt (University Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge) is a member on the Advocacy Forum.

I was surprised because, to put it honestly, the Open Library of Humanities project represents new and non-traditional thinking regarding the nature and future of scholarly communication in the Humanities. Others may reflect similarly from within their own disciplines, but as a generalization, I know religion and theology scholars are committed to long-standing and authoritative academic traditions. They tend to be skeptical of fads or what they perceive to be change for its own sake. Would they be able to see any relevance for themselves in an open access and multi-disciplinary project like this? And yet, I felt proud to see these particular scholars coming out to engage this new thinking through direct participation in the OLH project. It was sort-of a validation of my own open access advocacy in religion and theology, and an opportunity to demonstrate that, yes, there are real scholars within the discipline who are thinking about and embracing new mediums and formats of research communication.

I was interested to get these scholars to tell me about their work and research; about their thinking regarding open access publishing in Religious Studies; and especially about their decision to participate directly in the Open Library of Humanities project. I am pleased to share the conversation I was able to arrange with Peter Webster and Justin Meggitt. I regret that I was unable to contact Professor Engler to participate in this conversation.

The Conversation

Omega Alpha: Thank you, Peter and Justin, for the opportunity to speak with each of you. Can you tell me a bit about your academic career and specific interests. What about your vocation and current activities? Peter, why don’t we start with you. As I understand it, you are what we might call an independent scholar/researcher, and you have a “day job” at the British Library. Is that correct?

Webster: Yes, that’s basically it. For a number of years I have worked in what you might call the interface between scholars and digital resource providers and developers. I worked for eight years, until recently, at the Institute of Historical Research, which is part of the University of London, doing resource development, networking, advocacy, conferences, and various digital projects to support university departments of history, including managing the digital repository for a group of ten specialized research institutes, of which IHR is a part. Last summer, I moved over to the British Library, where I look after communications, engagement and liaison activities in terms of digital projects for the United Kingdom Web Archive. That’s the day job.

Parallel to this, I have nurtured a research interest in twentieth century British religious history. I did my doctoral work on religious music in the Stuart Church in the Early Modern Period of Britain. Through a circuitous route, I started looking at questions relating to religion and the arts in the twentieth century, particularly, initially, contemporary church music in the 1950s and 60s. My research interests have widened-out from there. Right now I’m doing a study of Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s for Ashgate’s The Archbishops of Canterbury Series. Also, I’m hoping shortly to conclude contract terms on a biographical study of Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, who was a patron of the arts in the Church of England.

Meggitt: My current post is as University Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge. I’ve had a number of ‘normal’ academic posts, such as British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge and lecturer in New Testament Studies in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. But I have always had a direct interest and involvement in such things as distance learning (as it used to be called) and continuing education because I would consider it my vocation to enable the widest possible access to the critical study of religion, in all its forms. That explains why I have ended up where I am today.

I continue to straddle the traditional academic world and that of lifelong learning, supervising graduate work in the Faculty of Divinity and producing research appropriate for someone holding a permanent post at the University of Cambridge. But in my role at the Institute of Continuing Education, I contribute to a range of forms of teaching that allow public engagement with current thinking in the study of religion and cognate fields. My interests are somewhat varied, but are largely concerned with religion in ancient and early modern cultures, and the themes of poverty, slavery, madness, magic, and apocalypticism, amongst others.

Omega Alpha: How did you first learn about open access? How did you become a “convert” to OA, if this is the right way of putting it?

Webster: My becoming a ‘convert’ to open access isn’t an inappropriate way of putting it, in some ways. My exposure to open access came mostly through being in charge of the institutional repository at IHR and its affiliated research institutes. I became drawn into open access over time dealing with management policies, talking with faculty, etc. The IR served primarily the Humanities with a bit of Social Sciences on the edge. It was very interesting to see how scholars responded to, and hear what they thought about open access within that quite dedicated humanities space. Incidentally, I think it’s fair to say that the Humanities are a significant distance behind, certainly behind the natural sciences, regarding open access.

I don’t think very many people, if pushed, would dispute the general principle of open access—that academic research ought to be freely available for anyone who might conceivably want to read it, especially if it is publicly funded. I think I would probably stop short of saying there is a moral obligation for open access, though I do agree in the idea of supporting open access as a ‘public good.’ There are benefits to the scholar having their work available to even a lay readership in this way. The material that scholars write about in the Humanities (including Religious Studies) in theory is more easily accessible to the average reader than most of microbiology is, for instance. One might expect humanities scholars to be more engaged in open access precisely because of what there is to be gained from it in terms of getting ideas out for public discourse—knowing that their research has relevance. So I’m surprised by this reticence. Is it a lack of confidence that what we do is too specialised to be of interest to anybody?

I suppose I have it relatively easy, though, because no one pays me to do the research I do. I’m not dependent on it for tenure, or anything like that. But almost all my existing research for which I can get permission to do so is in the repository I used to run. Having seen the usage statistics, I know that it gets the kind of traffic that one couldn’t possibly expect if it were only still available in print. You will have a sense of the average use of a typical theological monograph. I’m pretty sure my stuff has at least been found and the PDFs opened by a much larger number of people. This usage has yet to present itself in citations, but that’s partly because my material is quite new. I would expect to see the ‘citation effect’ build-up over time. There are studies suggesting there is this demonstrable ‘citation effect’ for open access.

The other thing I would add is the whole international dimension. The traffic to the material in the repository is coming from all sorts of places around the world, not just western anglophone countries as you might expect. So, if you want your work to be read as widely as possible this is an obvious way to go. If you can get past the ‘professional drivers’ there’s a lot to be gained.

Meggitt: I do not think I was ever a ‘convert’ to open access, but I see in OA the key values that have shaped my understanding of what higher education teaching and research should be. I have always been driven by the desire to facilitate access to the most recent ideas in the field, and to bring into discussions contributions of those who otherwise would be excluded from usual academic debate, to the detriment of us all. (If I hear anyone studying religion use such exclusive terminology as ‘Academy’ or ‘Guild’ I get an unpleasant, visceral sensation.) Although I have spent years working in the long-established ‘continuing education’ model here in the UK (alongside more traditional responsibilities)—teaching in village halls, and at evening classes, and writing distance learning materials that were delivered by mail—I have also always been interested in the possible liberative effect of technology. Initially, I saw its value for those with disabilities. But then, more broadly, in its capacity to allow access to resources and research beyond the privileged few at well-resourced higher education institutions.

Over a decade ago I became involved in early print-on-demand publishing, partly out of a desire to challenge the prevailing model of academic publishing that was, I believe, consigning most scholarship in Religion (and the Humanities more generally) to functional oblivion through its prohibitive costs (what I’d call the ‘monograph crisis’). The traditional model was also slowing intellectual debate and exchange down to snail’s pace. I hoped technological developments would speed it up. About the same time, I also became a user of and advocate for open source software.

To be brutally honest, all this comes from my religious and political views, enhanced by bouts of (limited) penury and job insecurity earlier in my working life—something that comes with fixed-term contracts and the somewhat unpredictable nature of much UK higher education. It has also come about as a result of my experience of both so-called ‘research intensive’ and ‘non-research intensive’ universities here and in the US, and the widely different access to resources students and scholars have at these institutions.

Omega Alpha: How did you learn about Open Library of Humanities? Tell me specifically about your interest in this project, and why you decided to join one of the advisory committees.

Webster: I follow Martin Eve on Twitter, and back in January after the project idea first got going he put out a call for interested folk to get in touch. I tweeted back saying that I’d be interested to be involved some how. He wrote back inviting me to join the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee.

What is very interesting to me about the project is the way in which peer review may be dealt with. I’ve become more and more convinced that the current system of peer review is an accident—that it is actually the product of a particular historical confluence of a technology (print) and a particular way of rewarding or assessing where academics are in relation to each other. OLH is examining the approach used by the Public Library of Science, which very helpfully separates-out two quite distinct functions of peer review. A basic level of gatekeeping for basic competence in method, and expression, and documentation, and genuine engagement with the field of scholarship as it lies. That’s a useful filter to have. It’s relatively fast and light-weight to do. It can be reasonably objective. You can tell if someone’s footnoting is right, whether there’s engagement with most of the work in the field, and if there’s a coherent argument involved. These are reasonably objective criteria.

We’ve allowed peer review to carry the weight of trying to establish how important something is. It seems to me, that were I a journal editor, I shouldn’t think my judgment, while informed, should necessarily be authoritative in determining whether or not something should be published based on my assessment of how ‘important’ it is. It seems to me that it is the readers who are in a better position of determining whether or not a piece of research is important. I believe ‘the cream will rise to the top.’ There is now no issue of capacity, referring back to the technological ‘accident’ of print above with its inherent limitations of space. We allowed the rationing of scarce space in a print journal to become a proxy for importance. I believe anything that is defensible in scholarly terms should be published, and the genuinely important stuff will be found—it will rise to the top. This second function, which includes various kinds of ‘altmetrics’, is called post-publication peer-review. I don’t see any reason why this approach shouldn’t work in the Humanities.

Meggitt: I came across OLH quite recently, as a result of the reaction to the Finch Report, which recommended that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain. What bothered me was that amongst many colleagues in my field—at least here in Cambridge—there was a strongly hostile reaction to the idea, despite this being a public university. This provoked me to seek out those who could see the potential of open access in the Humanities—those who were thinking creatively and practically about realising it. And so I found OLH. I am associated with the Advocacy Forum because, although I’m not very well known, I’ve done quite a bit of media work here and there, and public engagement (an element of advocacy) is what I do for a living.

Omega Alpha: What do you think about the “mega-journal” and multi-disciplinary format of OLH compared to traditional subject- or association-focused journals in religion? How might this format compare to subject-focused gold open access journals in religion?

Webster: At the pragmatic level, I don’t see lots and lots of open access journals utilizing the PLOS model springing-up in the various disciplines. The strength is in the platform itself, which can serve as a common technical backend for the various disciplines within the Humanities. The platform gives us economies of scale. Having a multi-disciplinary platform doesn’t preclude the creation of discipline-specific journals on the platform. We may find, over time, that the users of the platform are in a position to curate their own subject subsets of material. Or over time, as you build-up a large amount of content, we may find we can create special issue ‘journals’ retrospectively edited, bringing together ‘the cream’ of most significant and important research. A looser structure at the beginning will give us greater flexibility as things develop and mature. Being able to search across disciplines may enable us to to make research connections we might miss in a more siloed environment.

Meggitt: A multi-disciplinary humanities mega-journal will be good for the study of religion as the scrutiny of religion should be a multi-disciplinary endeavour. At present, a number of traditional subject- and association-focused journals in religion—including some extremely prestigious ones—have become parochial backwaters, slaves to tradition or fashion, and frustratingly cumbersome vehicles for enabling academic debate. The OLH model should, amongst other things, disrupt this. I also like the idea of articles—albeit ones that have met the “ready to publish” criterion—being judged on their significance by the users of research rather that journal editors trying to prejudge this. We are, I am sure, all aware that whilst editors do a good (and often unpaid) job—and I’ve done this myself—they can also be problematic, replicating assumptions within the field and restricting its development, or conversely, using their weight to push ideas and approaches that lack substance but survive longer than they should.

Omega Alpha: What would (or do) you say to fellow scholars in religion and theology who may be reluctant to embrace open access as a viable and legitimate scholarly communication venue?

Webster: I don’t have that many opportunities for ‘evangelism’ in that way (going back to your question relating to my ‘conversion’ to open access). But I would simply come back to all the benefits that we were talking about before. I think the various objections to open access come down to getting the implementation right, rather than issues with the principle of freely available access to this work that we’re all doing. I would major on the opportunity to get material out fast to wide audiences, including lay audiences, and of course, the international dimension. You would hope that a healthy Church, or faith community more broadly—if we’re looking at this from a religious point of view—would be an organization or community that engages with its own history and scholarly thinking about what it is that it believes and practices. You would think there would be a greater than average gain for theological scholars in being able to reach those audiences directly.

Meggitt: I would say that they need to think hard about how inequitable and inefficient the current system of academic publication in religion is and whether they really think its a good idea to perpetuate. Why are we so wedded to financially restrictive ways of disseminating research that limit access to knowledge to the privileged few (by which I mean institutions as well as people)? Do we really value work in our subject so little? The reluctance in some quarters seems to come from ignorance about the financial models involved in academic publishing. But I also think the reluctance comes from a fear of what might happen if a form of research dissemination and evaluation emerges that is not tied to certain assumptions about academic status and credibility but the actual, demonstrable, significance of the output. The OLH model, for example, will help break up the patronage networks that afflict the field, and that is not a bad thing.

Omega Alpha: Do you have any final thoughts?

Webster: For scholars who are used to traditional print-form research outputs, engagement with open access will lead necessarily to greater engagement with the digital environment and the use of digital methods of research production and communication, such as blogs and other social media, enabling us to interact more directly with our audiences. Relatedly, this ought to make us think harder about how we write, how clearly we write, and the audiences for whom our research material is written. It’s a cliché to say that academic writing is often opaque, but there is enough of it that is opaque to make it a truism. I do not think it should be impossible to write clear and accessible prose that also conveys difficult ideas. These two things need not be incompatible. It strikes me that communicating with all the groups that have a stake in what it is we do (that is, not just scholars but also interested lay persons) is a good place to test that hypothesis.

Meggitt: The study of religion and theology in the UK is marginal to academic life generally. To most of those involved in higher education, it is only present as a result of historical accident, the legacy of past inequalities of power or reflecting the increasingly uncritical agendas of special interest groups who are in the business of trying to buy influence (particularly as government funding recedes). Some of it, and I am afraid this is particularly true of theology, is judged to be little better than phrenology. Such a picture is unfair but it is a prevailing one. It is, for example, hard to think of someone who would identify themselves as a scholar of religion today who is taken seriously in any other field. If more of those involved in study of religion supported OLH they might well find their work valued by a far wider constituency than is currently the case and it would, I think, disrupt the prejudicial assumptions so many other academics have about what we do and ultimately, what it is worth.

Omega Alpha: Peter Webster and Justin Meggitt, thank you so much for your time and your participation in this conversation. I was struck by many of the common threads that wove their way through your various responses. I will, of course, continue to watch developments at the Open Library of Humanities with considerable interest. Perhaps you will allow me to check-in again with each of you as those developments touch on the impact of open access on Religious Studies research communication.

Croatian Open Access Declaration, the “Hamster” portal, and open access theology journals

I received an email last month from Matina Ćaran, theological librarian at the Biblijski institut/Bible Institute in Zagreb, Croatia about open access initiatives happening in her country. She told me about the Croatian Open Access Declaration that was officially released on October 24, 2012, and about Hrčak (“Hamster”) an open access scientific journals portal, which also hosts a number of journals in theology, including Kairos, a title published by the Bible Institute. I want to thank Ms. Ćaran for bringing these initiatives to my attention. I am also indebted to Dr. Ivana Hebrang Grgić, senior research associate with the Department of Information Science Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, whose book Open Access to Scientific Information in Croatia: Increasing Research Impact of a Scientifically Peripheral Country (2011, pre-publication version) added significantly to my understanding of the current state of open access in Croatia as I was researching for this piece. Thanks too, goes to Google Translate, which helped me immensely with the Croatian language.

Croatian Open Access Declaration

The Croatian Open Access Declaration was presented at a workshop hosted by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Zagreb, on October 24, 2012 during International Open Access Week. The workshop featured presentations by professors, librarians, computer information technologists, and a computer science student. The opening speech was given on behalf of the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports—the central funding body for basic research in Croatia—which has put open access to scientific literature on the national agenda. The first signatories of the Declaration were members of the organizing committee and presenters at the workshop.

To express our concern caused by lack of strategic points of reference on access, dissemination, storage and preservation of scientific information in Croatia, we are making the Croatian Open Access Declaration the purpose of which is to sensitise everyone who participates in creation, publishing, use, and preservation of scientific information in Croatia. In our declaration we are stressing the fundamental importance of scientific information, necessity of it being available to everyone, and obligation of its permanent preservation. Open Access means unrestricted, free, and undisturbed online access to digital scientific information that allows scientific information to be read, stored, distributed, searched, reached, indexed and/or used in any other legal way. Unrestricted in this context means free of any restrictions and terms imposed upon its access and use. For the purpose of having unrestricted access to the information, it is necessary to guarantee anonymity to the information users. … We are inviting the state administration, headed by the ministry responsible for science, as well as scientific and educational institutions, organisations, professional associations, and all the others involved in gathering and publishing scientific information to act decisively and in coordination in order to store all the Croatian scientific information in open access form. (from the Declaration)

As of February 2, 2013, 549 persons have added their names in support of the Croatian Open Access Declaration.

Hrčak (“Hamster”): Portal of Scientific journals of Croatia

In 2003, the Croatian Information and Documentation Society developed an idea for a central online portal for storing and accessing Croatian scientific and professional journals. The platform was developed and is maintained by the University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb, and it receives support from the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia as part of the government’s Science and Technology Policy [PDF]. The portal, which was launched to the public in February 2006, is called Hrčak, or “Hamster,” (apparently) named for that rodent’s remarkable ability to stuff its cheeks with food, which it then safely stores in its nest, to eat as needed at a later time. Not only is Hrčak intended as a portal for current access, it also serves as an archive for ongoing preservation, including journal titles no longer in publication. The Hrčak portal utilizes Open Journal Systems (OJS) publishing and peer-review management backend.

Thanks to Hrčak, publishers have a free, simple and fast tool for creating online versions of their journals, i.e. for small effort and no cost they can become OA publishers. Publishers are responsible for the regular uploading of full text articles and for inputting metadata at journal, issue and article level. Authors can see their articles’ download counters; their articles have better visibility and impact. Research and academic institutions get the chance for better dissemination of their research results. Readers (who can be scientists or the wider general public) can easily access the results of publicly funded research. Web robot software programs can disseminate information about the articles to the global scientific community. (Hebrang Grgić, pp. 48-49.)

According to Dr. Hebrang Grgić the majority of journal publishers in Croatia are not-for-profit, a status that makes them eligible for government support. According to the “Code of ethics for editors on the Hrčak portal” [PDF in Croatian], open access content is a pre-requisite for inclusion in Hrčak, with preference given to content that is immediately available (simultaneous with the release of a print or digital version). In special publishing circumstances, an embargo of up to 6 months is allowed, though issues will not be publicly displayed as published in the portal during this time. Finally, to enhance international visibility of Croatian research published through the portal, bibliographic information such as titles, abstracts, and keywords should be included in English and other languages. Conversely, inclusion of foreign-published Croatian research in Hrčak should include bibliographic information in Croatian. As of this writing, Hrčak has archived 323 journals, 7,013 issues, and 88,218 full-text articles.

UPDATE: I received further information about Hrčak from the portal’s development team at the University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb. The name “Hamster” is an acronym for HRvatski (Croatian) CAsopisi (journals). The portal was developed in-house and has been designed to be easy to use. “It does not support the whole publishing process like OJS, just the publication of ‘finished’ articles. Journal editors do all the manual work. They enter articles (each article as separate pdf) and respective metadata for their journal. We also have an OJS instance for interested journal editors, and have implemented a bridge between OJS and our back-end so there is no need to duplicate effort.”

Theological journals in Hrčak/Hamster

Calling this a portal for scientific journals is technically misleading from a disciplinary standpoint, because Hrčak also includes journals in the social sciences and the humanities. “Scientific” here is meant to encompass any systematic scholarly study of a topic or subject.

Of particular interest are 22 journal titles listed under Theology. A closer look shows 20 titles with content, including 3 titles that are apparently no longer published, but issues are included for archival access. About half the titles include coverage in theology as part of the inter- or multidisciplinary scope of the journal. Ms. Ćaran is not aware of any significant theological journal that is not included in Hrčak.

About a third of the journals are relatively new, having begun publication in the last 10 years. But several have been around for a long time, including Obnovljeni život/Renewed Life (ISSN 0351-3947), published by the Institute of Philosophy and Theology of Society of Jesus since 1919, and Bogoslovska smotra/Theological Review (ISSN 0352-3101), published by the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb since 1910 and is considered one of the oldest Croatian scientific journals. (I have created links to these titles in the Journal Directory.)

Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology

One of the relative new journals is Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology (ISSN: 1846-4580 (Croatian), 1846-4599 (English)), published by the Biblijski institut/Bible Institute, Zagreb beginning in 2007. (I have created a link to this title in the Journal Directory.) On the journal’s website, editor Stanko Jambrek lists four goals for the journal.

First, to be a canal for communicating the gospel and biblical values to intellectuals, pastors, preachers, students, believers and society. Second, to be a publishing support to Croatian evangelical theologians and scientists as well as lovers and doers of the Word of God. Third, to be a Croatian Evangelical voice to the world. Fourth, to publish articles of authors from around the world who are important to Evangelical Christianity in Croatia. The academic works of Croatian authors and authors from abroad who work in Croatia or who have been, in some way spiritually connected and influential in Croatia will be published in the articles and discussions section. Articles may be from biblical, systematic and applied theology, ethics, Church history, and sociology of religion, philosophy and church life. The journal publishes academic works that are characterized in accordance with the recommendation of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport of the Republic of Croatia. Kairos publishes articles that are reviewed and those that are not subject to review. Articles that may be categorized as “academic” or “expert” need to have at least two positive reviews. Reviews are anonymous. The journal publishes articles without review that are of relative content for Evangelical Christianity, well thought out and well written.

I gathered Dr. Jambrek’s statement that the journal publishes academic works “in accordance with the recommendation of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport of the Republic of Croatia” is referring to standards of academic quality, peer-review, etc. But also because the journal is open access.

As it happens, librarian Matina Ćaran is the journal’s secretary. I was able to ask her about Kairos as an open access journal.

We are proud to say that Kairos has always been open access, and will continue to be so. Kairos has so far been published by the Bible Institute, and as of this year it will continue to be published jointly with the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia. It is the first Evangelical theological journal in this region of Europe. Although it is a fairly new journal, over the last six years it has become a true Evangelical voice in these parts of the world, and we are reporting both strong and diverse readership. As a secretary of the Journal, I am happy about our growing exchange with other journals in the region, and presence in various open access databases and libraries.

Ms. Ćaran is also a signatory on the Croatian Open Access Declaration. I asked her about her philosophy of open access.

I am a librarian hoping for the time when I will no longer have say to my fellow students: “This is a article you need, but we cannot get it for you.” My personal philosophy of open access rests primarily on front-line work with students, and my personal experience throughout my previous and current studies: hitting walls of restricted access, having to become skilled in all kinds of ways to get to the requested information, article or book, and trying to work with what one has. However, even before I started working as a librarian at my school, I always believed that scientific information is something that is shared and given, not possessed and bought, and that everyone honestly seeking it for the sake of good should have an equal opportunity to access it.

Adoption of open access in Theological Studies will accelerate with a new generation of scholars—like Jack

Jack Weinbender works half-time in our library as my assistant. He’s a whiz around an Excel spreadsheet, so I regularly put him to work gathering and representing our user and resource statistics. He’s also a mean (self-taught!) web coder, so I put him to work implementing the recent re-design of our website. It looks great!

Jack is a senior at a nearby seminary. He is currently preparing applications to various doctoral programs in ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies for next Fall. Jack is an excellent student and a competent researcher. I hate the prospect of losing him as an employee, but I sincerely wish him well in his desire to find a placement for continuing his studies.

The other day Jack shared with me a draft of the Statement of Intent he is preparing to accompany his applications. As I was reading, I encountered this excerpt (included with permission):

Upon completion of the PhD, I hope to participate actively as a professional scholar through the publication of my own research and as an instructor in the classroom. On both fronts I feel that I can make meaningful contributions professionally. For example, I hope to be an advocate for open publishing in the fields of Near Eastern and biblical studies by supporting the few Open Access publications extant in the field and by advocating for open scholarly communication via the internet. In a similar vein, I hope to engage students in the classroom by utilizing sound curricular design theory with meaningful and measurable learning outcomes. (emphasis added)

Jack is aware of my open access advocacy, and it is gratifying to consider that I may have had an influence on his thinking as he contemplates a future in research and teaching. It is even more gratifying to consider that as a scholar of a new generation, Jack and others like him will surely accelerate the adoption of open access in theological and related fields of study. Blessings to you Jack!

Hat Tip: Open Access Explained!

One of the clearest, concise, and entertaining explanations of open access I have seen. Check-out this animated comic, Open Access Explained! narrated by open access advocates Nick Shockey, Director of Student Advocacy at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and Jonathan Eisen, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology at University of California, Davis on the PHD Comics website.

The piece focuses on open access to publically-funded scientific research. I wished for more of a nod to Humanities scholarship and the unique challenges of our disciplines relating to open access. But the explanation still translates very well. For example, this excerpt—I believe it is Jonathan Eisen speaking—could just as easily be applied to Humanities scholarship:

I think the main impediment [to open access] is the slow movement of scientific cultural practices. Scientists, despite being great explorers in terms of knowledge, are sort-of very conservative in changing their practices. Lots of the [scientific] community says: “O yeah, I support openness…but I want a Nature paper [that is, I only want to publish my research in a high-profile journal].” That reliance on impact-factor and the name of the journal [prestige] does allow some journals to not respond to the community pressure toward openness…

[We need to experiment with other models.] I view it much more as scientists and scientific publishers are slow to change. Some of them are going to be left in the dirt because openness is clearly the future. The creative ones are going to survive.

Hat Tip: David Weinberger interviews open access advocate Peter Suber

This hat tip goes to the Radio Berkman podcast at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University), Episode 206 for August 16, 2012, entitled “Unlocking Research.” In this episode, David Weinberger interviews open access advocate Peter Suber.

Peter Suber is Director of the Harvard Open Access Project and author of a new book on open access called (simply) Open Access (MIT Press, 2012). In this interview, Suber provides a clear and concise portrayal of what open access is all about, and where it is heading. Here’s a particularly interesting segment, where Suber speaks to the challenge of open access while also exposing a couple of key issues that need to be sorted out in this scholarly communications debate:

Weinberger: There are certainly still, let’s say, social and career reasons why at least some researchers like to publish in closed access journals. Is that changing?

Suber: It is changing. The advantage for researchers is not that the closed accessed journals are closed, it’s that some closed access journals are prestigious. So the advantage comes from the prestige not from the lack of openness. When an open access journal is just as prestigious as a closed journal then all the advantages lie on the open side.

But to gain this kind of prestige a journal needs to have been in existence for a long time. It needs to be venerable. It needs to have been around long enough to have a reputation. Open access journals tend to be new, for obvious reasons. So most of the venerable, high prestige journals are not open. Some of them have converted to open. Some of them are now allowing open without providing open. Some of them are permitting authors to provide open. But by default most of them are not open, and the incentives for researchers, especially university faculty members is to publish in high prestige journals regardless of the terms of access.

Weinberger: One of the qualities that gives a journal prestige, though, is not simply that it’s old and venerable, but that it excludes most of what is submitted—that there is some type of editorial process, peer review processing, and very few items get in.

Suber: Right. But open access journals can have rigorous peer review at the very same levels. Having rigorous peer review and having a high rejection rate is orthogonal to openness in this sense. Because it doesn’t mean that a journal must be sold as opposed to given away, it just means that the editorial process has to be selective. The older journals can be more selective. Journals that have more prestige have a better reputation and can be more selective because they have more submissions. The more submissions you have the more you can afford to reject a larger number.

But the same thing can happen on the open access side. As more open access journals become prestigious—as they become selective they become prestigious; as they become prestigious they become selective—then they have the same advantages that the venerable high prestige, high quality closed journals have had. There has never been an advantage of being closed. There’s only been an advantage in being high quality, high impact, high prestige.

There’s a related problem for open access journals, which is that in order to acquire prestige, they must attract high quality submissions. But in order to attract high quality submissions they need prestige. So, brand new journals that have few submissions and no prestige yet—because they’re brand new—have a hard time acquiring prestige and quality. So this is another reason why the incumbent journals have a built-in advantage. Again, not because they’re closed, but because they’ve been around long enough to have both submissions and prestige.

…

One of the most common and harmful misunderstandings about open access is that the very purpose is to by-pass peer review, and that it’s to make all scholarly literature like Wikipedia, or like blogs. Not at all true. We want open access to the peer reviewed literature. … That’s the focus of most open access policies and most open access advocacy.

The interview is just over 28 minutes long, and is well worth a listen.

Open Access Interview: New Testament Scholar Larry Hurtado

It’s been a number of years since I’ve really immersed myself in direct theological research—ever since my vocational path diverged from the start of a doctoral program and took me, first into pastoral ministry and then to my present career in academic librarianship. I did get a chance to step back into the pool a bit while working on my Information and Library Science degree at the University of Arizona in 2004. I wrote a paper on intertextuality and canon for a graduate independent study elective course in Judaic Studies. And for the research methods course in the library program, I developed a research proposal that intended to look at the adoption of the codex book form by early Christian communities from a sociological perspective, using diffusion of innovations theory developed by Everett Rogers.

I continue to be intrigued by the evolution and historical adoption of codex book technology, especially as a background and possible analogy to the technological developments we are currently witnessing with e-books, e-readers, and tablet computers. As time allows, I try to connect with the literature that offers new insights into this topic. I think it was in 2007 that I read a fascinating book entitled The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (William B. Eerdmans, 2006), which includes a chapter on the early Christian preference for the codex book form. This was my first exposure to the writings and scholarship of the author, Larry W. Hurtado.

Larry Hurtado is Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1996-2011). He is an influential scholar who has written extensively on early Christianity, including Jesus Christ as a focus of devotion and worship, and the aforementioned title, which commends the close study of the physical and visual features of early Christian biblical and non-biblical manuscripts (not just their literary content) for insights into the origins of this religious movement.

I subscribe to GOAL: Global Open Access List, an international email forum moderated by Richard Poynder dedicated to discussing open access issues in scholarly communication. Imagine my delighted surprise when reading through a recent daily digest of GOAL I see a post and several subsequent replies by Larry Hurtado.

It has been my contention since beginning this blog that the advancement of open access scholarly communication in Religion and Theology critically depends on the awareness, engagement, and (hopefully) the authorization from established and respected scholars regarding this issue. It is easy to assume that many scholars are either still blissfully unaware of open access; they don’t understand what the fuss is all about (the current system has worked well enough for them); or they are suspicious of the scholarly rigor and quality of research submitted to open access journals. That is why I was so excited to see Professor Hurtado’s posts. I emailed him and asked if he’d be willing to be interviewed for my blog. He graciously consented. What follows resulted from an email interchange and a face-to-face conversation online via Skype.

Early work promoting online academic journals

Omega Alpha: I saw your posts on GOAL, and let me say first-off that I got very excited. I said to myself, “Hey! What?! Larry Hurtado? I know that name!” It was exciting for me to see a well-known and respected biblical scholar engaged in the conversation about open access.

In your posts, you were observing that current open access policy conversations (happening in the UK, Europe, and the US) seemed to be focused on the Sciences. You expressed concern about the apparent lack of attention in these conversations on the Humanities, including the hardships humanist scholars would face—due to significantly lower funding—with author-side OA business models, especially where these models might be mandated (e.g., publicly funded research), or where a one-size-fits-all approach might be adopted by a publisher. I resonated with your comments and I wanted to talk with you further about this. Thank you for agreeing to this interview.

In the introduction I alluded to the focus of your writing career. Can you tell me more about your teaching career?

Hurtado: After my PhD work, I taught for 3 years at Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), and then moved to University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) in 1978. I was offered the post of Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. I retired from that post in August 2011, but remain active in PhD supervision and in pursuing research in my field (New Testament & Christian Origins).

Omega Alpha: In one of your posts on GOAL you mentioned being involved in promoting online academic journals in the early 1990s. I’d like to hear more about this. What were your intended goals in wanting to move academic journals online? The terminology and even the concept of “open access” was not really in parlance at the time. Would you say you were aiming to make research communication more accessible and more widely distributed? Were you in any way aiming to move away from a subscription-based model to one where research would be freely accessible? In other words, if you had the terminology, were you envisioning open access as it is understood today?

Hurtado: During my years at University of Manitoba I founded the Institute for the Humanities (I was the first director of the Institute from 1990-1992), which involved my giving attention to the needs of researchers in the Humanities. I had been involved in establishing IOUDAIOS Review, an online book review journal patterned after the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. I also began organizing a committee at University of Manitoba to hold an international conference on exploring and promoting refereed electronic journals. This conference (the first such) was held at University of Manitoba in 1993.

My own concerns were two-fold: First, the costs of paper journals, especially in Sciences-Medicine-Technology fields, many of them commercially published (e.g., Elsevier) were consuming a vast portion of university library budgets (at University of Manitoba I was told 70%; at University of Edinburgh I have been told around 50%). This meant a restricted book-buying budget that hit the Humanities particularly hard. Second, traditional paper journals were taking an increasingly long time to get things through the backed-up publication queue. Articles often took two years from submission to publication, largely because of limited number of pages per issue of journal. This meant an unnecessary and unhelpful lag in publication of Humanities scholarship.

In 1997 I was invited to address a conference held at Caltech, attended mainly by university provosts, where these issues were discussed. [See reports on this conference here and here.] At that time, there were two major proposals being debated. Stevan Harnad was promoting “scholarly skywriting.” [See this early article by Stevan Harnad about his proposal.] My proposal was for a consortium of universities and learned societies to promote specifically online, refereed journals that would feature traditional editing, refereeing, etc. This sort of journal could move from periodic regular “issues” (e.g., quarterly) to publishing articles as soon as they were ready. And there need be no arbitrary restriction of length, as there were no paper pages to worry about.

This consortium proposal was intended to by-pass the commercial publishers entirely, with libraries and academics in the driver’s seat of publishing academic research.

The financial models were then varied: There could be a cost-recovery-subscription approach (which would likely reduce the serials budget cost dramatically). There could be an “open access” (no subscription) approach, with the costs of online publication borne jointly by universities and academic societies. These costs would be minimal, or certainly radically cheaper compared to current commercial subscription costs.

Yes, the “open access” emphasis came later, and in principle I am comfortable with it.

Omega Alpha: This was pioneering work, and you and others were seeing the potential of this new medium to advance scholarship in new ways. Most academics and scholars now work online on a daily basis, and it is easy to take this early work for granted. 15-20 years is like an eternity ago in “Internet time.” (Incidentally, in January I interviewed Professor Ehud Ben Zvi, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who was also seeing the potential. He started the online open access Journal of Hebrew Scriptures in 1996.)

Since beginning our email correspondence, I was able to secure through interlibrary loan a copy of the Proceedings from the 1993 International Conference on Electronic Refereed Journals. You gave the closing presentation entitled, “A Consortium for Networked Publication.” I found this excerpt from your presentation remarkable:

[I]f commercial [publishing] firms are allowed to dominate the development and use of the network for publication of research, we will be in a situation similar to the present state of paper-journal publishing, with a rich supply of (often expensive) journals in some commercially attractive fields, and other fields neglected as unattractive commercially. I have no desire to restrain commercial firms from their legitimate quest for profits. But I do think that academia in general, and perhaps especially in the sciences and technology, needs to consider whether it is desirable to leave the development of the Internet for research publication so fully in the hands of commercial firms as traditional paper journals are in some fields. In other words, I suggest that academia should take the emergence of the Internet, this new medium of publication, as an opportunity to re-affirm the historic role of scholars as both producers and disseminators of research (pp. 19.2-3)

Your words from 20 years ago sound almost prescient! For it would appear that academia did largely choose to leave the development of the Internet in the hands of commercial publishers rather than take the opportunity to make fuller use of this “new medium of publication” based on a different model. Why do you think it turned out this way? Was the system carried-over from the print world, including mechanisms for management of peer review, just too well developed and entrenched? Do you think academic administrators and decision makers may have thought, in the early 1990s at least, that this “Internet thing” was just a fad?

Hurtado: Scholarly habits are hard to change. Academics like to think of themselves as progressive, but they’re mostly traditionalists. Scholars have grown used to publishing through journals in particular ways. And universities have grown used to simply purchasing journals externally (except perhaps in cases where they have their own university presses).

Ironically, my sense was that in the 90s, commercial publishers of journals and books were amongst the slowest and most reluctant to recognize the possible advantages of the Internet. The Internet did not appear to be immediately advantageous to university administrators because they didn’t know quite what to make of it. That is why I was delighted that as a result of the Winnipeg conference, the special conference was held at Caltech a few years later. It was a conference of about 60-70 university provosts from across the United States. The implicit purpose was to try to get them on-board to understand the advantages of refereed Internet publication in such a way that, hopefully, it would then telegraph downward through the university administrative structures to deans, and heads of departments, tenure committees, etc. so that in principle, refereed publication in electronic form would be treated at par with traditional print publishing. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to push that idea with these administrators.

Quite what’s been done with it thereafter, I don’t know. I think what happened in the succeeding 15 years is that a combination of commercial interests, government, and funding/grant bodies have jumped-in to come up with their own “solution” to the problem. It does not appear, however, to have been driven by research constituents.

Omega Alpha: By the way, in your presentation you mentioned academic fields that commercial publishers would neglect as “commercially unattractive.” You might suppose that Religion and Theology would fall into this category. But theological librarians have begun noticing in the last 8-10 years or so an increasing number of society journals being acquired by commercial publishers. And while still laughably inexpensive compared to the standards of the Sciences and Technology, what frequently accompanies these acquisitions—and what librarians cannot avoid noticing when the bill comes—is a dramatic increase in the price of institutional subscriptions. Their margins are lower, but it would seem all bets are off when it comes to acquiring any property that has the potential of turning a profit.

Hurtado: Yes, I’m on the editorial board of a journal that was taken over by a commercial publisher about seven years ago. We had some discussions with this publisher early-on because initially they said to us, “We think this title is vastly under-priced. We think that the market will bear much more. We plan to quadruple the price over the next 2-3 years.” Those of us on the editorial board said, “No! You are making a mistake here. A sizable percentage of our subscribers are individuals and theological libraries that don’t have a lot of money. You will lose half of the subscribers.” They said, “Oh, that’s OK. We can still lose half the subscribers and the net amount of income will be the same with the increased price.” We said we weren’t just interested in talking about income. We were interested in the journal being read by as many people as possible. In the end, our protestations had some impact. They decided only to double the price.

Of course, in the global sense, it isn’t the price of Humanities journals that is causing the problem. It’s the high priced journals in the Sciences and Technology, which consumes so much of the total university library budget and then puts pressure on everyone. When there are cuts to be made, the approach is typically to call for reductions across the board, purporting to spread the pain around equally to all. They come to us and say, “We need to cut the journals budget by 10%. Which titles do you want us to cancel?” I want to say, “We’re not the problem with your budget! Forcing cuts to low-priced journals in the Humanities isn’t going to solve anything. Go after the people in the Sciences, and leave us alone!”

Author-side open access funding model promoted by commercial publishers will be difficult for the Humanities

Omega Alpha: I gathered that your participation on GOAL was motivated by your interest in the topic of open access. However, I did not gather from your comments what your position (if that’s the right word) on open access is, other than the concerns you expressed regarding the difficulties of the author-side funding model for the Humanities. Would you be willing to say more? How would you characterize your position on open access as a scholarly communication concept generally, and specifically as a scholar, or as a representative of a learned society?

Hurtado: As indicated above, in principle I’m comfortable with open access. But my own emphasis is that online, open access, whatever, should retain as essential the practices of peer review, scholarly editors/editing, etc. I am against the imposition of article processing charges on all disciplines. I am wary in general that the problems created specifically by journal publishing in the STM fields will generate a “solution” that will be imposed on all of us, without regard for the distinguishable concerns of Humanities scholars/disciplines. My main emphasis is that decision-making processes must include Humanities scholars as full partners.

Omega Alpha: What would your list of “distinguishable concerns of Humanities scholars/disciplines” include?

Hurtado: Humanities scholars don’t have access to the amount of research funds that scientists have, so it would be much more difficult, for example, to go to a page-charge model for journal publishing. Second, Humanities publishing doesn’t rely as heavily on journals. Monographs remain the “gold standard,” and so models of scholarly publishing have to reckon with this. Scientific research journals are often expensive and commercially produced, whereas Humanities journals tend to be very cheap by comparison and often published by academic societies at a not-for-profit level. There are other aspects of the “culture” of Humanities research and publication, and these need to be on the agenda and on the table as governments and other large bodies plan for the future.

Omega Alpha: Monographs are the “gold standard” in the Humanities because the format accommodates to the demand for deep and sustained treatment of a scholarly thesis. But academic publishers, particularly university presses, have for a long time complained that publication of scholarly monographs is not economically viable—a situation made worse by strained library book buying budgets. Do you see a way out of this conundrum? Although university presses insist that a good chunk of the cost of publishing a scholarly monograph is tied-up, not in printing, but in such activities as copyediting, electronic layout and typesetting, proofreading, and marketing/promotion, do you see any academic reasons why monographs could not be published in e-book form and made available on open access platforms?

Hurtado: We probably need to distinguish between the traditional “short run” technical monograph, and the scholarly book that is of equal scholarly weight, but because of its subject matter or the way in which it is written, happens to have a wider reading public. The later may still continue to be commercially viable in print. The former, where the entire print-run is maybe 250-350 copies, I think could easily be moved to electronic format, to avoid the so-called “death of the scholarly monograph.”

I don’t see any academic reasons why this couldn’t happen. I believe people are getting more used to reading e-books, and this will only grow as the technology with e-book readers and tablets continues to develop, and the operating software for these devices continues to improve in sophistication. Scholarly monographs as e-books would also save shelf space in libraries and greatly simplify access.

Omega Alpha: Getting back to journals, it is my sense that scholars in th Humanities still value and prefer associating their work with a context that carries/creates/reinforces historical continuity in textual artifacts. They do, however, seem to be increasingly comfortable with online journals, and no longer strictly insist on print.

Speaking of Stevan Harnad above, who is a strong proponent of scholars self-archiving their research in open access repositories (so-called Green OA), do you have any thoughts on the merits of self-archiving pre-/post-publication research reports (articles, essays, etc.) from traditional journals, or would you see greater potential for our disciplines in the conversion of existing or creation of new journals to open access (what is called Gold OA)?

Hurtado: As I said, all scholars are in fact curiously traditional, though we like to think of ourselves as progressive. So it’s not surprising that it will take time to move to any new academic procedure, especially something as central as academic publishing. I rather suspect that, as is already happening, the process will be ragged, not centrally controlled (probably good), and uneven.

While we’re waiting to see what other developments there may be, I agree that scholars should feel entirely free to post (e.g., on their own web sites) at least the pre-publication version of their essays. It is my understanding of copyright law that what a journal/publisher owns is the typeset version. The manuscript version is not copyrighted. I have done this with a number of publications on my blog site under the “Selected Essays” tab.

But I would hope for a larger shift such as I have repeatedly urged, involving the academic “establishment”, especially universities (involving libraries and also university presses) and academic societies. Universities have the libraries as key access-points for scholarly material, and as responsible for maintaining (and so migrating e-publications to new formats as they appear), and university presses have publishing expertise (e.g., editing, etc.), and academic societies are supposed to represent the collective interests of given disciplines.

Omega Alpha: Regarding author archiving of pre-/post-publication articles and essays, I believe re-use rights depend on the copyright agreement signed with the publisher. Pro forma agreements tend to be pretty restrictive, and in the past authors have been all too willing to sign away their copyrights on the promise of getting published. More recently, authors have been starting to push-back and are increasingly negotiating retention of their copyright, while granting publishers specific uses utilizing licensing such as Creative Commons.

Given levels of funding in the Humanities, I totally agree with you that use of author-side charges is not a sustainable business model for open access. Further, I believe the embrace of this approach by (some) commercial publishers may be a cynical attempt to appear “pro-OA” while retaining control over an entrenched scholarly communication system, and protecting their profits. I believe commercial publishers who service the Humanities are starting to see a harder time promoting the author-side model. The money just isn’t there, regardless of mandates. I have spoken with Religion publishers at a couple of large commercial houses that are trying to promote open access using a “mega journal” format and author-side charges, but they haven’t had much uptake yet. I think they will resist converting subscription-based journals if it means a threat to revenues.

Hurtado: I’m not myself terribly concerned about maintaining the income stream of commercial publishers. They can look after themselves. I don’t especially blame them. They exist to gain profits for themselves and their shareholders. I’m primarily concerned with the production and dissemination of scholarly research. Publishers have been terribly slow in taking up publishing technology. We can’t expect them to lead anything.

Getting more folks involved in the conversation

Omega Alpha: Do you have any ideas on how institutions and societies might be encouraged to more strongly embrace open access? I suspect there might be some reluctance by societies to give-up subscription-based revenue streams that support programming (either from their own in-house publishing, or the royalties they receive from partnerships with commercial publishers). Still, you would think the membership of such societies would push for change as they grow in awareness of the access problems created by putting research behind paywalls. Universities and colleges must surely see that the cost of buying back research through library institutional subscriptions would more than support a shift to open access. Too, it would seem that there is still a significant degree of misunderstanding that publishing in open access journals is somehow lower quality research. Clearly, the word needs to get out that respected scholars are sitting on editorial/advisory boards and serving as reviewers of many scholar-published open access journals that are not expensive to operate.

Hurtado: The sort of event like the one held at CalTech back in 1997 might be helpful. We need to get university administration on-board, promoting recognition of e-publications in refereed journals as carrying full weight in career decisions (e.g., tenure). Universities are classically the producers, the consumers, and the repositories (guarantors and archives) for research. They are the institutions with sufficient longevity and commitment to (re-)assume the responsibility for this role. We need to get learned societies on-board as speaking officially for their respective disciplines. I think that if we can persuade the scholarly community—even in individual disciplines—to go this way, it would have a creeping effect. And we need established scholars to invest time and energy in serving on editorial boards, and also in submitting publications to e-venues. They can afford to do so, having tenure, full professorships, etc., and their reputation will draw a readership to some degree. The big problem is establishing refereed e-journals, and getting them known. I’m on the editorial board of the open access journal TC. It has been around for 16 years but is still not well enough known.

Omega Alpha: Yes, TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (ISSN: 1089-7747) is open access. (Incidentally, I created a link to it on my Journal Directory page.) Can you say more about it? Do you believe it is significant that TC is open access? Do you believe it is/can be a model for encouraging other open access efforts in Religious/Biblical Studies?

Hurtado: I’m proud to be a member of the TC editorial board (for a number of years), and I believe that it is a kind of model for where scholarly journal publishing in the Humanities needs to go. TC began as a freely accessible online journal in 1996, and it is now an official online publication of the Society of Biblical Literature. It remains open access. That was a big step forward because it gave the journal a kind of credibility that was very valuable. And it was encouraging because it indicated to us that the Research and Publications Committee of the SBL was at least aware of this issue.

What we need is more robust support from major learned societies and from university administration. Scholars need to know that publishing in a journal such as TC will count fully for matters such as promotion and tenure. And they need to know that such journals will be indexed, so that their work can be noted and cited.

Omega Alpha: Professor Hurtado, it has been a pleasure speaking with you. I want to tell you that in preparing for this interview I discovered your blog, and I’m finding it a delight to read. I also took the opportunity to read your pre-publication essay posted open access (!) on your blog that will be part of a new multi-authored book called The Early Text of the New Testament published by Oxford University Press, and available in the US in a month or so.

A few Religious Studies articles showing up in SAGE Open open access “mega journal”; reviewers being solicited

The other day I received an email from a librarian colleague who is also a scholar in New Testament. He considers himself an “under-employed Ph.D.,” by which I gather means having the academic credentials but not a full teaching position. I don’t know the circumstances of his situation, but I do know he is not alone. Professorships in Biblical Studies are notoriously difficult to come by.

His email was interesting on a number of levels. He was asking, as someone who is trying to establish himself “as a competent scholar,” why he should consider open access instead of trying to get his articles accepted in “well-known and prestigious journal[s].” He was also curious about copyright issues with open access.

These are important questions that I want to follow-up with in a subsequent post. In this post, however, I want to write about the specific situation that prompted his questions. A couple of weeks ago he received an unsolicited invitation from SAGE Publications to be a reviewer for their new open access journal, SAGE Open. He had never heard of SAGE Open. He wanted to know what this was all about.

What is SAGE Open?

The model for SAGE Open appears to be PLoS ONE, a multidisciplinary open access science “mega journal” (particularly for the life-sciences and medicine) published by Public Library of Science, the now renowned non-profit open access science journal publisher.

SAGE has had a program in place for some time which enables authors to pay a fee to make their articles open access, particularly to comply with mandated archiving policies by funding agencies. But this is SAGE’s first foray into open access journal publishing. SAGE Open (started in 2011) is seeking to do and be for the humanities and social/behavioral sciences what PLoS ONE is and does for the sciences.

The “mega journal” approach differs from “traditional” discipline-specific journals (even in electronic format) in a number of significant ways. First, as already noted, it is intentionally and broadly multidisciplinary (browse SAGE Open’s subject coverage here, which to my initial surprise includes Religion and Religious Studies). SAGE, again following PLoS, is promoting this as a strength of the journal: “[B]y not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, SAGE Open facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers, whether within or between disciplines” (from the SAGE Open “About the journal” page).

Second, unlike what most scholars are used to, the SAGE Open mega journal is not organized as a limited collection of articles (typically with other editorial or review content) gathered into issues and then released at some specified (periodic) time interval (quarterly, bi-annually, etc). In SAGE Open, research articles are published continuously as they are submitted, peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication. The journal leverages the inherent strengths of online dissemination on their web platform (the journal is online only), which is not hampered by the practical limitations of space or distribution imposed by the print journal archetype. SAGE Open has an ISSN (2158-2440), but the published article is really the major currency of the title. Because articles are published continuously, this speeds up the overall publication process. The timeframe from submission to acceptance to publication can now be measured in weeks instead of months (or even years).

Finally, SAGE differs from PLoS in being a for-profit commercial publisher, but is similar to PLoS (and Springer, another major for-profit open access publisher) in covering the costs of making SAGE Open open access by charging article processing fees in lieu of subscription or pay-for-view fees to would-be readers. PLoS ONE currently charges a $1,350 fee for each article accepted for publication. SAGE Open charges $695 per article, but currently has a “special introductory rate of $395.” The article fee pays for peer-review, copyediting and typesetting, archiving, “global distribution” on SAGE’s online journal platform, and branding/marketing by “a world-leading social science publisher.” Authors retain their copyrights under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY 3.0).

A few Religious Studies articles showing up in SAGE Open

I had visited the SAGE Open site for a cursory glance a while back. But after my colleague’s inquiry I was prompted to take a closer look. I know that SAGE publishes a number of journals in Theology and Biblical Studies. But why would a New Testament Biblical Studies scholar be invited to review for a broad multidisciplinary humanities and social science journal? When I browsed the subjects I was surprised to discover an entry for Religious Studies, and a link to three articles. Not a lot. But it’s a start.

Editorial structure, peer-review and journal development

I contacted the Biblical Studies and Theology Publisher at SAGE to inquire about the relationship between SAGE’s traditional journal offerings and Religious Studies coverage in SAGE Open. She is not currently directly involved in this open access effort. However, she was kind enough to explain how SAGE Open intends to function editorially to include subject coverage in Religion.

The SAGE Open managing editor (working with a team out of SAGE’s office in the United States) recruits an external academic editor for every article submitted, in consultation with subject editors within SAGE. The article editor will be a reputable academic, working in a field related to the subject of the article. The article editor is then responsible for the peer review process, and will recruit two academic reviewers for each article. This ensures that the decision-making process for articles is independent of SAGE and conducted by academic experts. There is an academic board in place, whose capacity is advisory. Their names are listed here. The pool of article editors and peer reviewers is much wider, representing a diversity of subject areas. That pool is growing all the time, in parallel with submissions. The aim is to provide a forum for sound research, and naturally we hope that the individual subject categories within SAGE Open will grow and become a place that people interested in specific disciplines will recognize for quality.

The peer review process is designed to evaluate the scientific and research methods of each article for validity; the article editor accepts articles solely on the basis of the research and not on the basis of thematic significance. In other words, if the scholarship behind the research is sound, the article is accepted. This approach allows readers greater access and gives them the power to determine the significance of each article through SAGE Open’s interactive comments feature and article-level usage metrics.

I asked her if SAGE has plans to develop any dedicated open access journals in Biblical Studies, Theology or Religion. Her response was understandably vague and noncommittal.

In terms of future direction, I’m not in a position to define SAGE’s strategy here, other than to say that we see SAGE Open as an important part of our portfolio, alongside our other journals, books and digital products. SAGE monitors market developments closely and, like any successful business, we aim to move with the times and adapt our approaches accordingly. We remain open to exploring different models and channels of publication, where such developments are strategically sustainable and contribute to the quality and depth of our portfolio. If you have thoughts on possible future ventures for SAGE then I would love to hear about them!

Her reply suggests that SAGE Open is serving as SAGE’s demonstration that it is on-board with open access. Her response also answered my question about my colleague’s invitation. Subject editors and reviewers, once secured, are paired with authors as their articles are submitted. So, if my colleague accepts the invitation, he will be placed in a large multidisciplinary pool of academic experts on-call to review articles matching their subject expertise. Again, different from traditional discipline-based journals that intentionally seek articles from within a relatively narrow scope, with SAGE Open, the articles that are submitted and are subsequently accepted for publication drive subject area development from within the journal’s broad scope.

Because of this, there is really no reason why a scholar in New Testament couldn’t submit an article for inclusion in SAGE Open. When this happens, a subject editor would be chosen to shepherd this article through the submission process. My colleague might be called upon to review this article based on his subject expertise. Then, if the article is accepted for publication, the subject coverage within SAGE Open simply expands (or the granularity is refined) to accommodate. Fascinating.

This model has been very successful for PLoS in the life sciences (where I understand hundreds of articles are submitted each week). I can see SAGE making a go of this for the social/behavioral sciences. It is harder to say how this model will function in the humanities, where discipline focused publishing is a hallmark of scholarship. The journal is still very young. To get things going, SAGE is selling authors its publishing expertise, a seat on its well-developed and interactive online platform, and its brand reputation. Readers discover articles through search engines and indexes, or they can subscribe to email alerts or RSS feeds from SAGE Open’s site.

Why did you decide to publish your article in SAGE Open?: A response from one author

I was curious how the authors of the three Religious Studies articles currently available in SAGE Open first learned about the journal, and why they decided to submit their article to SAGE Open. So I emailed them. I received one response.

This author heard about the journal through a bulk email sent from a subject editor at SAGE. This author provided an extensive explanation for deciding to publish in SAGE Open, but it came down to the peer-review and article selection process.

When I received the invitation to submit to SAGE Open I initially ignored it; I get such automatic invitations from pay (or “page charge”) journals all the time. However, when I got a repeat email on March 12, 2011, I decided to look closer into their mission, and I read the following sentence, “As such, it evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research.” In plain words, the promise was if the research was sound it would be accepted, regardless of whether it fit the mold of [conventional or preconceived] solution strategies. Ergo, I submitted the manuscript.

Speaking of “pay (or ‘page charge’) journals,” I asked: “Did you pay the article-processing fee yourself, or did you have a sponsor (supporting agency, academic department, etc.)? Did you think the fee was a fair amount? Do you think the article-processing fee approach is a sustainable business model for open access?” The author responded:

I paid it myself. There was an introductory, discounted price of $195 fee (the regular price was $695). I believe the former is reasonable to be paid by the author. The latter would probably require assistance from a sponsor.

The author felt, however, that page charges “seem to be antithetical to the purpose of open access.”

I then asked if the author would share article-level metrics. “Is your article being discovered and read?”

According to Publish or Perish (which parses Google Scholar), it has not yet been cited. A Google search shows it has been discussed on one listserv and has been mentioned on two blogs. There was one inaccurate, off-the-wall comment on SAGE Open’s site, which allows readers to post comments after the journal. It is probably just too soon to tell if the article is being discovered and read.

Finally, despite reservations about article processing fees, the author was positive about recommending SAGE Open to other scholars, including scholars in Religious Studies disciplines.

I don’t know whether this author’s recommendation will inspire the confidence of my librarian/New Testament scholar colleague to review articles or submit his own for publication in SAGE Open. But at least we now both have a better understanding of what the “mega journal” concept is all about.

Richard Poynder interviews PLoS’s co-founder and open access advocate Michael Eisen

Earlier this week Richard Poynder posted an interview with Public Library of Science’s (PLoS) co-founder and open access advocate Michael Eisen. Eisen was one of the original signatories to the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement. Over the last twelve years, PLoS (founded in 2000) has transformed from an open access advocacy site to a successful open access life sciences publisher.

Michael Eisen recently wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times (January 10, 2012) vigorously opposing proposed House legislation known as the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), which has generated significant backlash against commercial academic publishers that supported the legislation, and has spawned alternative proposed legislation in the Senate. (See also my “Not entirely off-topic: The Research Works Act”.)

Poynder is himself a strong open access advocate, but he didn’t give Eisen a free pass. In particular, Poynder was pretty hard on Eisen and PLoS for failing (as yet) to significantly bring down the cost of scholarly journal publishing. Lower cost is supposed to be one of the principal benefits of open access.

A common approach for covering the costs of open access publication is to charge authors/sponsors an article processing fee in lieu of reader subscriptions. But these fees can be quite high, and one wonders about the sustainability of this approach (even though institutional sponsors or grant funders often foot the bill). In response, Eisen insists that marginal costs will be reduced as the technological infrastructure is more fully implemented and as authors submit articles in publishing-ready formats. He did seem to admit that we’re not there yet.

The scale of scientific journal publishing—even open access scientific journal publishing—is dizzying for scholars in Religion and Theology. Nevertheless, this is an interesting and informative read that ranges over other open access topics such as the potential for an enlarged role for article self-archiving (so-called “Green OA” vs. journal-based “Gold OA”), and alternative models for peer-review.

The Golden Rule: “If you want open access to the research in your field, as a reader, then make your own research open access, as an author.”

This “hat tip” goes to Springer’s Author Zone Newsletter (Issue 10, January 2012) featuring an interview with longtime open access advocate Peter Suber. Suber concludes his response to a question summarizing the benefits for authors to publish open access by saying:

Finally, authors who make their own work OA contribute to a milieu in which others do the same. It’s the golden rule. If you want OA to the research in your field, as a reader, then make your own research OA, as an author. (emphasis added)

Now there’s a principle that should resonate with scholars in Religion!

Springer is a large international commercial publisher that has in recent years become heavily involved in open access through their SpringerOpen division and platform. Although strongly oriented toward the sciences (STM), last week I received an email from the Senior Publishing Editor in Philosophy & Religious Studies informing me they would like to try to develop more open access journals in Philosophy and Religious Studies. An interesting development. I’m waiting for a reply to my request for more information.

The interview above links to a more extensive interview conducted by Richard Poynder with Peter Suber in the July/August 2011 issue of InformationToday (Volume 28, Number 7), “Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution.” This interview is very much worth a read as a way to get an overview and insight into the issues at play in the open access publishing landscape.