Humanities

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

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This list is still under development. Every part of it may change before the official launch, including its title, URL, and method of organization.

• This is a list of information and resources concerning open access in the humanities. The list is divided into three categories, each organaized alphabetically:
  • Introduction to OA in the Humanities
  • OA Resources
  • OA Initiatives

• This list is not exhaustive. We welcome contributions of any new resources concerning open access in the humanities.

• Related Lists in OAD: Publishers of OA books, Disciplinary repositories

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Introduction to Open Access and Open Access in the Humanities

“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.”– Peter Suber. Read the rest of his brief introduction to open access [[1]].

Below are a few helpful links to various sites explaining open access. Some have a humanities-geared theme while others are more general.

• Open Access FAQ - MIT [[2]] - Frequently asked questions and their answers relating to open access.

• Open Access Glossary – University of Nottingham [[3]] - Popular terms and their definitions used in the world of open access. Very helpful to those less familiar with this universe.

• Open Access in the Humanities/Art LibGuide via Washington University [[4]] - Links to articles and information about OA and the Humanities.

• Open Oasis [[5]] - Guide to implementing Open Access - Last updated in 2009 but very useful information still available.
  • From Open Oasis: An Introduction to Humanities Open Access Publishing [[6]]

• Promoting Open Access in the Humanities, an article by Peter Suber [[7]].

• SPARC [[8]] - Developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), SPARC’s mission is to “stimulate the emergence” of open access models of scholarly communication.

Open Access Resources

These are some specific resources in the humanities that are open access. Featuring them on your library’s website is a great way to raise awareness of their availability.

• Art Images for College Teaching [[9]] - Freely available images of various media including architecture, paintings, sculpture, etc.

• Digital Humanities Now [[10]] - A journal of both open humanities scholarship and news in the digital humanities community. Crowd-sourced, but reviewed and curated by the site. They publish a weekly update as well as a quarterly journal, the Journal of Digital Humanities (see below).

• HathiTrust[[11]] - The HathiTrust is a free digital library that "brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form, preserving them securely to be accessed and used today, and in future generations.” The HathiTrust has currently digitized:
  • 10,547,953 total volumes
  • 5,556,329 book titles
  • 274,609 serial titles
  • 3,691,783,550 pages
  • 473 terabytes
  • 125 miles
  • 8,570 tons
  • 3,232,354 volumes(~31% of total) in the public domain.

• Humanities – An Open Access Journal [[12]] - From the journal: “Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) is an international, peer-reviewed, quick-refereeing scholarly open access journal (free for readers), which publishes works from extensive fields including history, law, literature, philosophy, religion, arts, linguistics and so on. There is no restriction on the length of the papers as we encourage researchers to publish their innovative ideas and results in as much detail as possible. To guarantee a rapid refereeing and editorial process, Humanities follows standard publication practices in the natural sciences.”

• Journal of Digital Humanities [[13]] - Beautifully laid out scholarly journal for the digital humanities community, released quarterly. Very new, very forward, peer-reviewed.

• Open Humanities Press [[14]] - An " international open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide."

• Open Source Shakespeare [[15]] - Access to the complete works of Shakespeare with both text and concordance searching. Open Source Shakespeare was "built with four attributes in mind: Power, Flexibility, Friendliness, and Openness. It won’t replace the expensive, subscription-only sites at libraries or research institutions, but you can use the advanced search function, read the plays, and look up words in the concordance."

• Project Gutenberg [[16]] - Over 40,000 free eBooks available in various formats, the site also has searching and browsing capabilities.
  • New to Project Gutenberg is the self-publishing portal [[17]], which was created to “encourage the voluntary creation and distribution of electronic books. Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing’s purpose is to create a cloud service for contemporary writers to share their works with readers.”

Open Access Initiatives

• Institutional Repositories - Many universities are setting up institutional repositories to archive the scholarly work of their faculty on-site. This a great first step for an academic institution to take because its focus is the institution. Some additional information about institutional repositories:
  • “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” [[18]] – via the ARL.
  • Institutional Repository Bibliography [[19]] – “English-language articles, books, technical reports, and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding institutional repositories.”
  • Institutional Repository Example - Brandeis University [[20]].

Specific Examples of University Policies

• Boston University – Digital Initiatives & Open Access [[21]] - Boston University’s site describing all current open access initiatives at the university. Also present are links to current articles in the open access field and upcoming open access events.

• Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication [[22]] - Harvard University has open access policies in place through its disciplines. Clicking on the Faculty of Arts and Science from the main page, users may see what specific open access policies are in place in the humanities disciplines, noting that “the Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.”

• MIT - Open Access at MIT [[23]] - Like Harvard, each faculty member of MIT “grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.” The Provost’s office makes every article openly available through MIT’s repository.