Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/167

 two or more years for work to emerge when there is a dearth of critical material. Certainly, much of the material surfaces at conferences, but these are frequently closed enclaves and it seems bizarre that, with the advent of the internet, our means of communicating is restricted to either ﬂying across the globe – thereby contributing further to the crisis of global warming – or waiting two years, with a further delay of at least two years before any future work will be citing the ﬁrst piece.

There is also a further reason why it could be desirable to speed up the process of scholarly communication – for we might consider it thus, rather than being termed exclusively ‘publication’ – and that is establishing precedence. While it may be nice to envisage a scenario where ideas were free and there was no need to attribute authorship because researchers worked in harmony rather than competition, this is the road not taken. Indeed, academia becomes ever more competitive and the imperative for novelty – no matter how contentious that word may prove – is given increasing credence. While there have been many excellent arguments for the ‘slow humanities’ and the value therein, even the scholar who worked slowly but published quickly would be at an advantage over those who abhor speed in both camps. In short, regardless of how long it takes to produce an article or volume of research, for which there may be extremely good reasons, there seems little rationale for slower publication after that point. A ‘slow humanities’ may lead to more rigorous work, greater care, higher levels of feedback and better research. How slow publication, after peer review, might also contribute to any of those aspects is less clear.

This, then, is my argument in favour of preprints, with overlay journals (or even overlay book publishers) as a potential mechanism on top of this: speed of turnaround can have important social and intra-disciplinary ramiﬁcations. Making work available for the purposes of communication, rather than purely for certiﬁcation, could help to foster a better international research community. Likewise, establishing precedence will serve scholars better within a competitive framework. Although it may be desirable to eliminate such a competitive environment, it is worth noting that opposition to faster publication turnaround through preprints does not seem to serve that goal either.