Experiments with digital publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS): possibilities and challenges. A Summer university lecture

A new participant has been confirmed for the Summer University in Open Electronic Publishing that we are in the midst of organising: Janneke Adema, the prominent author of a recent report on electronic publishing in the humanities and social sciences. We invited her to host one of our ten lectures during the week.

This lecture will focus on the international landscape of digital publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and recent developments therein. Within these fields the monograph is still the preferred means of communication. However, the system of book publishing within the HSS is faced with a no longer sustainable print-based model. Solutions are being sought based on digital production and distribution with all the possibilities and challenges this carries with it. Within this workshop we will look at some recent projects and experiments launched mainly by not-for-profit university presses and libraries, which focus on the publishing of open access digital monographs. Next to that we will take a closer look at some experiments by both scholars and publishers within the HSS with open peer review, networked, remixed and liquid books. These experiments are challenging both the standard format of the monograph and the traditional assumptions and preconceptions on which our current knowledge systems are based. Questions that will lead the discussion are whether the experiments conducted are a real challenge or alternative, or whether they are a continuation (in digital form) of the print-based knowledge system. What are the technical, cultural and economic factors inhibiting us form devising a truly digital-based system? Will it even be (practically and theoretically) possible to devise a system more akin to the digital? What will be the possibilities and challenges of such a system? And finally, which standards inherited from the print world are we not willing to let go off, and why?

Janneke Adema is the author of the OAPEN report Overview of Open Access Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2010), and co-author of OAPEN – Open Access Publishing in European Networks: Report on Best Practices and Recommendations (2010) and Digital Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Report on User Needs (2010). She has published in New Review of Academic Librarianship, Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, and LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, and is currently writing a PhD on the future of the monograph in the Department of Media and Communication at Coventry University. She blogs about her research on Open reflections.

See also:
Second Summer university in open electronic publishing: a pre-programe