Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/92

 1996 and that hosts non-peer-reviewed material.66 The idea is that, in the disciplines covered, it is important that new discoveries are circulated as quickly as possible to allow others to verify ﬁndings as well as to establish the author’s precedence and claim to originality, even while peer review is ongoing. To this end, arXiv allows researchers to put their manuscripts online for public access while the processes of review and publication in scientiﬁc journals are in progress. More relevant for the discussion at hand, however, is the fact that arXiv’s revenue model is one under which Cornell University Library (CUL), the Simons Foundation, and a global collection of institutions support arXiv ﬁnancially: ‘Each member institution pledges a ﬁve-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual fees are set in four tiers from $1,500–$3,000. Cornell’s [the host of arXiv] goal is to raise $300,000 per year through membership fees generated by approximately 126 institutions.’67 A similar model has been implemented by another project, SCOAP3, for high-energy physics, except this time for fully peer-reviewed, ﬁnal publications.68 Likewise, Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg have proposed a model for the humanities under which there would be a central fund, created through an annual or multi-year payment from every institution of higher education, to which institutions and scholarly societies can apply through a competitive grant process.69 With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, my Open Library of Humanities project is also attempting to implement a similar model for journal publishing in the humanities.

These are models in which a moderate number of institutions come together to support a publishing platform. Because the ensuing research is freely and openly available to all, supporting institutions are not, themselves, ‘buying’ a commodity item. Instead they are banding together to bring to fruition projects that would not otherwise exist. Such an approach circumvents the economic problems engendered by the inherent micro-monopolies that are seen in scholarly communications. It could also make possible gold open access publishing without processing charges, which could work extremely well for the humanities discipline. However, it also comes with two distinct problems of its own: (1) the ‘free-rider’ problem in