Welcome back to my blog! This week we met back in person (well, synchronous over zoom) for the first time in sixth weeks! Today, we used class today to reflect on how we tackled the digital methods on our own, our budding NEH grant proposals, and our next topic of discussion: open access scholarship. I decided to wait until after our discussion today to broach this topic in my blog, as I was very curious to see where the discussion went in our class – with one foot in humanities and one foot in a more science route (the forensic part of forensic anthropology), I really enjoyed listening to the perspectives of my professors and classmates.
We read three pieces of literature this week: 1) Martin Paul Eve’s (2014) Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future; 2) Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s (2012) “Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication“; and 3) Melissa Terras’ (2016) “Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities.” The first two readings overlapped in the sense of what it means to be open source and what might an open source system look like. The third reading took a different route and focused on the practice and ethics of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Our discussion primarily focused on the first two articles and I’ve decided to focus on some of those ideas for my blog today.
Our discussion opened with Fitzpatrick’s (2012) idea of “giving” away research, or passing on knowledge that will be useful to others moving forward even if it can’t solve the problems in the past. In regard to open source literature, this idea focuses on opening the doors to knowledge to future scholars even though we can’t change the past of scholarly fees and peer-review processes that may prevent access to countless interested individuals. I am personally a fan of open-source literature because I’ve been on the side of research without much access. I went to a very small liberal arts college for my master’s degree and I had to constantly ask friends at other, larger universities for help accessing articles that I knew existed, but were behind a $25+ paywall. I promise that I was dedicated to my path towards earning my degree, but was not necessarily interested in becoming bankrupt on the way there…
However, since I became a student at MSU for my doctoral degree, the sheer amount of article access has been like night and day – I feel on top of the world and can actually pursue projects or queries of thought not possible before. But it is frustrating how my university of choice can dictate the research I have access to, which then limits what research I can actually do. Some of my cohort members from my master’s degree are in a similar position or have moved on from academia into full-time applied positions that require practical applications of forensic anthropological methods, but do not provide the means to access new, more valid methodology. Thus, having more open access scholarship seems beneficial to both the production of new research and to the proper application of current forensic anthropology methods.
But, as I mentioned before, I do have one foot in a side considered as more of a hard science. In forensic anthropology, there is a probability that you will go to court for a case and legal standards dictate which methodology can be used by an expert witness – it must be generally accepted in the field, peer-reviewed, replicable, and have known error rates. In this sense, the current paradigm of academic scholarship is beneficial to the field of forensic anthropology, as prestigious journals filter out “bad science.” However, in our reading by Eve (2014), we are introduced to the idea of peer reviewing that still allows for open source publication. Many books (including one by Kathleen Fitzpatrick) has been released to the public prior to publication in order to get more of a crowdsourced peer review. This can provide feedback (on things such as clarity or interdisciplinary topics used) that may be missed if your work is only reviewed by one or two other professionals with a specific skill set. In fact, Dr. Fitzpatrick mentioned that she strongly believes this process made her book much better and increased her overall sales.
Some models do exist for journals that do publish open source, but there are many problems with peer reviewing inherent in the system we have now (small fields = easy guesses when reviewing on potential research). Hopefully, we can work together towards a system where we can continue our academic integrity, but also “give back” to the other researchers in our field – as is the very point of the production of knowledge! We don’t create new research so that we can frame it on our living room walls for no one to see. We create research because we are interested in the continuation of knowledge and in answering questions no one has thought of before or examined in a new and different way. The reason I am in graduate school is to investigate ways to improve identification methods in forensic anthropology so that we can better serve the public. All in all, I’m excited to see where this discussion on open access research takes us in the years to come.
