Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/119

 literature grows, it becomes necessary to trawl for existing research that may have a bearing on one’s own work, but which lies within an entirely different sub-ﬁeld. While the same is true for the humanities, it could be argued that nobody is actively harmed compared to a situation where, for instance, previous clinical data indicating a danger to life remained unearthed. That said, just because ‘nobody will die if we can’t adopt text mining’ hardly seems a brilliant rationale, in the eyes of advocates, for leaving this route unexplored.

Text mining offers novel ways of exploring an academic corpus. For instance, should one wish to trace the historical genealogy of a speciﬁc concept, it becomes possible to see how ideas enter broader circulation. These techniques also offer the opportunity to search in ways beyond those implemented by publishers. While publishers have a good rationale for ensuring that people can ﬁnd the material that they have published, it also makes sense to allow others to be able to create discoverability and readability experiments. Indeed, eLife’s ‘lens’ software – which offers an innovative new presentation layer for already-published material – is one such example. The lens viewer is a system to re-present the same information in a published article within a new interface that focuses on aligning multimedia and reference elements alongside text so as not to distract from the reading experience in an exceptionally aesthetically pleasing fashion. In order to allow those who are thinking about such issues to have the chance to try new experimental technological presentations and data collection, open licensing is necessary, despite some jurisdictions loosening the prohibitions on such activities within fair use provisions. The computational techniques provided by text mining will not be of use to all humanities academics but they will be of use to some, especially if the broad ﬁeld of digital humanities continues to grow at its present rate.27

These aspects constitute some of the reasons why advocates believe that it would be beneﬁcial to apply open licenses to academic work in the humanities. It is not a comprehensive list but it does give a ﬂavour. However, sceptics argue that there are risks that come with open licensing – and particularly the more liberal forms of the Creative Commons licenses – and it is to these arguments that I now turn.