The Scholarly Kitchen

The Scholarly Kitchen is an incredible resource about scholarly publishing; at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, it's even a home page for some of us. But open access discussions on the The Scholarly Kitchen, like almost all discussions, analyses, and policies concerning OA, focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). It's not as if we don't have ample evidence now that OA has been primarily driven by the very real problem with for-profit publishers of primarily STEM publications. But we also now have ample evidence of the great divide between the circumstances in STEM publishing that have resulted in the emergence of OA policies and mandates from funders, governments, and universities and the realities of humanities and social sciences (HSS) scholarly publishing. (A coherent and compelling statement about the very different impact and implications of open access in the humanities is the British Academy's submission of evidence to the review of RCUK, summarizing and extending their report on Open Access Journals in Humanities and Social Sciences.