Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/166

 humanities and that overlay journals are one such mechanism through which this could be rethought. Once more, I will note upfront that OA does not require any of these innovations; it merely provides a historical juncture where it may be possible to implement them should we so desire.

Speed of turnaround and establishing precedence

As noted above, peer review – in whatever form – remains an important part of the scholarly publishing apparatus. However, as anybody who has attempted to publish an article or book within a deadline for any kind of assessment framework knows, it can also be a lengthy process. Delays in peer review, except in the case of ineptitude, are hardly ever the fault of the publisher. Rather, it is that overworked academics take a long time to respond to requests, then go over the deadlines and require multiple follow-up emails to ensure timely review. In extreme cases this can take years in some disciplines. However, once this process is complete, some publishers then attempt to synchronise their hard-copy journals with their online efforts, thereby re-introducing the artiﬁcial page budgets that I pointed out earlier and causing further delays. In journals this can result in a total publication delay of years from submission and often even longer in edited collections.

While some have argued that this delay is acceptable in humanities ﬁelds, there are problems with such stances. First of all, one of the most common rebuffs to a need for speed is that ‘nobody dies if work in the humanities isn’t published in a timely fashion’, supposedly in contrast to certain medical disciplines. I would contend, despite having touched upon such a claim myself earlier, that this may not always be the case. Is it not possible to conceive of humanities works that focus on immigration and hate crime – as just one example – in historical and/or cultural terms and that could change policy, thereby saving lives? If the answer is that the humanities can never have this kind of impact, then something is going very wrong given the ethical purchase that is often claimed for humanities work. To argue, conversely, that all humanities work must have this kind of impact is also nonsensical. Secondly, in many sub-ﬁelds, such as my own area of contemporary ﬁction, it is deeply frustrating to have to wait