Opening Remarks

Opening Remarks

by Geoffrey Rockwell for Open Digital Communities session of the Chicago MLA, 2007.

Welcome to session 66 on Open Communities. This session was organized by the MLA Committee on Information Technology initiate a discussion in the Association about open access to scholarship.

What is Open Access? An Open Access publication is defined by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing as meeting two conditions:

1. (first) “The author and copyright holder grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship …”
2. (and second) “A complete version of the work … in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving …”

The Committee believes that open access is of particular concern to scholars of the languages and literatures of the world. We would all like to be “open”, but the truth is that much of the scholarship that we publish is not open or accessible to those not at research universities in North America and Europe. We learn from the languages and literatures of the world, but do not return that learning to the communities studied. As an Association we need to ask therefore about open access to our publications while recognizing what the revenue from these publications makes possible. More generally, as an Association we need to ask if we want to be an open community of research and what that would mean. And that is the point of this session, to learn from colleagues who have been involved in developing open research communities.

Links about open access can be found at this blog entry.