At a recent talk I gave, I was asked whether open access in the humanities is a "solution without a problem". Without wanting to disparage my questioner, I consider this to be a question born of institutional privilege and of conservatism. Firstly, I consider it a perspectivized take on the situation; just because one cannot see a problem does not mean that it doesn't exist, merely that it is invisible to that particular questioner.

Green open access refers to making academic, peer-reviewed research that has been published elsewhere (even subscription/sales venues) available for anyone to read freely on the internet by depositing the work in an institutional or subject repository. A large number of journal publishers allow this. Ideally, this is done without embargo. To protect revenue, however, often a publisher imposes a delay.

The extraction of use-value, exchange-value or surplus-value from academic research at sites distant from the university. Define: impact was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on September 06, 2014.

In Althusser's Lesson , Jacques Rancière writes: "This reading of Marx via Althusser and Lacan does little more than give a new sheen to a thesis Kautsky had already defended: science belongs to intellectuals, and it is up to them to bring it to producers necessarily cut off from knowledge" Rancière, Jacques, Althusser’s Lesson, trans.

academia.edu is a "social network" for academics. Their latest design mirrors Facebook with its blue header and notification schema. When I saw Ben Lund speak about this at SCONUL, he implied that the outfit wants, in some ways, to disintermediate academic publishers.

Copyright is generally considered to consist of two components: economic rights and moral rights.

It is widely acknowledged (in many funder mandates, for instance) that open access for peer-reviewed academic books in the humanities is a harder proposition. The labour invested in their production is quantitatively higher than for a similar journal article and degrees of cross-subsidy are often levelled across a Press's list in order to support scholarship that might not otherwise be economically viable.

In recent days, there has been a surge of opposition from some members of the scientific community over the new journal being launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Aside from the high base-level charge from this publisher, which seems outside of the norm, one of the most controversial elements (also seen with some other publishers) is that the AAAS wants to charge more for a more liberal license.

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.

WaterAid is a very good charity to which I would heartily suggest that people donate. I also agree that it would be good if more people gave regularly to charity.

Update from a previous post, now with a final PDF. About This is a Cambridge "FirstView" version of an article forthcoming in Journal of American Studies. This article is copyright 2014 Cambridge University Press. This version of the paper is made available as gratis green open access in accordance with the publisher's policy.