The Future of Humanities Publishing

Mithu Lucraft, TBI’s Senior Consultant, joined a packed crowd for a University of London Press event exploring the future of Humanities publishing. Chaired by the Press’ Head of Publishing, Paula Kennedy, speakers included Frances Pinter (Executive Chair, CEU Press),?Jane Winters (Director of the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study),?Steven Hill (Director of Research, Research England),?Emma Griffin (President of the Royal Historical Society),?and Scott Anthony (Deputy Head of Research and Public History at the Science Museum).

There was a real diversity of perspectives shared by the panel, with topics ranging from the very rocky landscape of open access for monographs to digitisation and the potential for new scholarship through collaborations.

For Frances Pinter, we are at a pre-inflection point to OA. She noted that there is much agreement on what is wrong with open access (OA), but very little agreement on how to get there. She described first-generation non-BPC models that are emerging, similar to the Subscribe to Open model for journals. Ultimately, she concluded that while the direction of travel towards OA is clear, we need to work together on the pathways to reach that inflection point.

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Jane Winters?described two directions of travel for digital books, including a return to simplicity alongside a multi-layered network book, with new opportunities for narrative discussions and consumption. She noted there is a lot of pressure and challenge in these changes for authors to learn how to deliver this type of content. Jane also noted that the more we move to a networked model, the greater the need to focus on digital preservation. Data, code, and interactive models also need more consideration alongside text.

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Steven Hill noted there is a real space for innovation to revolutionize how scholarship in the humanities is communicated. He acknowledged the importance of “enabling and preserving” scholarship, with Research England investing ￡4.5m in infrastructure for OA books to address this. Speaking to the forthcoming REF, he noted that such assessments provide the incentive to facilitate OA.

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Emma Griffin spoke to the role societies continue to play in publications, which are often central to their mission. The RHS, in Emma’s words, has changed very little in its nearly 200-year history, not even in the advent of the internet, but the shift to OA feels very different and is worthy of more discussion.

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Scott Anthony talked about museum-led research and publishing (GLAM). He highlighted that the future of the discipline doesn’t replace in-person exploration, and that partnership with galleries and museums provide new opportunities for innovation, such as combining audience data with photos and videos to create new kinds of scholarship. He stressed that digital is still material, making preservation a key issue.