Presentation held at the Virtual Knowledge Studio's research colloquium in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on 7 May 2009 (www.virtualknowledgestudio.nl/). Thank you to Sara Kjellberg for initiating our exchange of ideas, Anne Beaulieu for inviting me and to everyone at VKS who attended!

1. The Eroticism of Paper: (how) can we imagine Humanities scholarship beyond the printed text? Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf [email_address] 7 May 2009

2. Scholarly publishing in 2009

5. universities spend between 05. percent and 1.00 percent of their budgets on journals subscriptions (Phillips, 2009)

6. academic journals have been the fastest growing media sub–sector of the past 15 years (Morgan Stanley, 2002)

7. the number of scholarly journals increased from 39,565 in 2003 to 61,620 in 2008

8. approximately 5.7 million people work in research and development worldwide, publishing on average one article per year, and reading 97 articles per year.

9. Challenges in the Humanities: economics Even as they face growing economic problems, university presses are receiving ever more submissions as a result of increased expectations for promotion and tenure in our disciplines and at our institutions of higher learning [..] Academics who think of a monograph as a particularly musty, narrowly focused tome [..] need to realize that for the scholarly press director today, monograph also describes virtually every book written by junior professors in the humanities seeking tenure [..] The term [..] applies to any book lacking in crossover sales potential . MLA Report: The Future of Scholarly Publishing, 2002

10. Challenges in the Humanities: access It is attractive to see these problems rooted in economics, and even more attractive to see the electronic world as an easy solution[..] However, the root problem is the centuries-old academic publishing model that insists upon restricted access to scholarship . This model requires scholarship to be a commodity within a market whose economics are based upon selling access [..] But in the electronic age [..] knowledge does not have to be sold . In fact, it shouldn't be. It's value increases with access and use , and the restricted-access paradigm is keeping Humanities scholarship quarantined. Burton, 2008

11. A (simplistic) comparison of different areas of scholarship Natural Sciences Humanities raison d'être “ discovery” “ reflection” signature method empiricism hermeneutics publishing: typical form journal article monograph publishing: critical aspect speed length & breadth publishing: prestige criterion ranking/IPF press/series name

15. but : changes in the Natural Sciences are largely pragmatic, in Humanities more fundamental and philosophical

17. support and interest from funding agencies and foundations (NEH, Mellon Foundation, DANS, DFG, ...)

18. but also skepticism: Heidelberg Appeal, conflation of legal issues (author rights), digitization, Open Access etc regarded as threats

20. a change in the medium we write and publish in will naturally bring about change in Humanities scholarship in general

21. Challenges of digital scholarly communication

22. Where do we go from here?

24. permanent/immutable

25. author-controlled

26. non-(real-time)-communicative

28. mutable

29. not fully controllable

30. potentially communicative

31. suited well for communication, but mutability makes 'archival' potentially problematic -> versatility

33. presupposes context/situational frame

34. is less concerned with permanence

35. tends to rely on interlinked sources

36. is personalized rather than objectified

38. depersonalized, frequently objectified

39. cohesively/logically/argumentatively (but usually not chronologically) structured

40. tries to be minimally context-dependent

41. “informational speech act” -> commitment to be accurate, inclusive, discursive

43. situational instability, mutability, loss of author control and dependence on other sources all translate into a loss of authority

44. the impact of this loss is felt most strongly in the Humanities because they lack a reproducible and objectifiable fundament

46. more horizontal (vs. vertical) reading and writing

47. scholarship likely to become more person-centric

48. ...and conceptually (more) oral

49. … and a pastiche of genres and forms

51. new, more holistic forms of peer review and evaluation

52. collaboration!

53. Thanks for listening!