I'm extremely pleased to be able to say that my next book is entitled Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future and it will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2014, with a preface by the esteemed Peter Suber. While print copies and versions for e-readers will be available for purchase, a PDF version of the book will be itself available open access under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Any royalties that I earn from sales of the book will go to Arthritis Research UK.
If you work in a university, it is likely that you have heard the term “open access” in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of pay-to-say publishing. In this book, Dr. Martin Paul Eve sets out the histories, contexts and controversies for open access, specifically in the humanities. Broaching practical elements alongside economic histories, open licensing, monographs and funder policies, this book is a must-read for both those new to open access or scholarly communications and those with an already keen interest in the latest developments for the humanities.
While I have been known for my outspoken views on OA, this book is not meant as a pro-OA polemic, even if I do eventually side with OA, but attempts to conservatively give information and arguments from both sides; it is intended to open a space in which it is possible to think critically (and sometimes more abstractly) about the research and publication practices of the academy and to allow others to join these debates. Amid some misinformation, there are genuine concerns and part of the point of this book is to move beyond the strawman debates and identify the true sticking points for all parties.
The book should be available to purchase through all the usual intermediaries. The official page for the book should be live soon. An OA version of the book will also be available in the Lincoln Repository once published and here on my site.
As part of the book and my ongoing work on open access, I will be giving a talk at Cambridge University Press on Tuesday the 2nd September which will be tweeted on the #openaccess hashtag. Feel free to join in with questions and comments!