Open Insights: The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales
Posted by James Smith on 3 April 2018
Heading for the Open Rogue: The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales
An Open Insights interview with Alex Mueller
Image: William Blake's engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims.
I suspect that scholars and
librarians feel roughly the same way about academic publishers. They find it
increasingly difficult to live with them, but fear they cannot live without
them. When skyrocketing subscription costs, delayed peer review processes, and
extended publishing timelines restrict access to research, scholarly
recognition, and progress toward tenure, academics become stuck within the trap
of a dysfunctional relationship. Open access movements propose a way out
through the elimination of price and permission barriers, making scholarship
available to all, accelerating the speed of publication, and enhancing the
potential impact of research. Even publishers and governmental agencies have
responded to this attractive model with alacrity, developing policies that
ensure that scholarly work, especially that which is publicly funded, is openly
accessible to all. To mitigate the loss of subscription fees for such access,
publishers have introduced Article Processing Charges (APCs), which require authors
to pay up to thousands of dollars for their work to be published. While APCs
can be written into grants, the majority of research in the humanities is
either underfunded or not funded at all. Humanists, therefore, find themselves
unable to afford the cost of the divorce and forced to endure an austere,
obligatory, and often bitter, relationship with their publishers.
As someone who knows the
cruel irony of publishing research on Wikipedia and digital
forms of debate in printed venues with no online existence, I have occasionally
fought feelings of despair about the future of academic publishing. Four years
ago, though, I began to develop a new way of thinking about the problem of
access. I was teaching a summer course in Italy about the history of letter
writing that asked students to follow the footsteps of Dante and Petrarch,
tracking the venerable history of the rules that govern written
correspondence—from the private letter to the public tweet—through seminars,
workshops, hands-on manuscript study in medieval archives and libraries
throughout the city, document digitization, and social networking projects.
While APCs can be written into grants, the majority of research in the humanities is either underfunded or not funded at all. Humanists, therefore, find themselves unable to afford the cost of the divorce and forced to endure an austere, obligatory, and often bitter, relationship with their publishers.
During the planning of the
course, the Italian faculty and I developed a bibliographic description project
that asked students to select, handle, and digitize medieval manuscripts housed
in the university rare books library. A week before the course began, my
Italian colleagues informed me that the head librarian refused to allow our
students to select manuscripts during our visit—she insisted they be selected
in advance. Disappointed but not discouraged, I selected ten manuscripts that
suited our course objectives. The day we arrived in Italy, the head librarian
had another requirement: no photographs would be allowed, which meant that the
publication of the manuscripts would be limited to textual descriptions on the
course blog. This news was deflating, but I reassured myself that students
would still be experiencing these precious materials firsthand. When we arrived
for our first day at the library, the head librarian imposed yet another
constraint: students would not be allowed to touch the manuscripts. Faculty
would have to scurry from book to book, turning pages for students, and
readjusting snake weights and cradles so that students would only interact with
the manuscripts from a safe distance. My resolve fading away, I whispered to my
Italian counterpart, “What do we do now? How can students complete their
projects without touching the manuscripts?” Making sure the head librarian was
out of sight, she replied confidently, “Siamo italiani. We’re
Italians. We’ll do it anyway.” Slowly but surely, the students began to touch
and photograph the manuscripts, at first clandestinely, and eventually within
the sight of the head librarian, who began to grow fond of us, even inviting us
to view deluxe manuscripts that few eyes had ever seen. By going rogue, we had
gained entrance to the archive and assumed an interpretive power I suspect the
students will never forget.
This mantra of “do it
anyway” has become a motivating force for my scholarly publications ever since.
And it has become increasingly clear to me that I am far from alone. Take for
example The Open
Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (OACCT), which
brings together forty-eight scholars, teachers, and even a student to provide
an introductory set of chapters and pedagogical resources designed to increase
the audience and impact of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, specifically
his Canterbury Tales. This project is grounded in the vision
of Brantley L.
Bryant and his co-editors, Candace Barrington, Richard H. Godden, Daniel T. Kline,
and Myra Seaman,
who desired a companion that would be accessible in all senses of the word:
available on the internet at no cost, compatible with a wide variety of devices
(printable PDFs or e-reader formats) and, perhaps most importantly, written for
readers who had no previous experience with Chaucer. Most companions address
scholarly audiences and rarely consider the needs and backgrounds of the
students who are often required to read them for their coursework. Rather than
assemble the usual cohort of experts from research universities, the OACCT
gathered contributors from a wide variety of institutions, ranging from the Ivy
League to the state college, in an effort to represent the wide array of
pedagogical and scholarly perspectives on Chaucer studies. The current
companion’s twenty-eight essay chapters (each devoted to an individual tale)
and six reference chapters (addressing relevant background such as “Chaucer’s
Difficult Lives” and “What Does It Mean to Read a Medieval Text?”) address a
wide variety of audiences, animated by the companion’s insistence that the
chapters “speak urgently to the interests, concerns, desires, nightmares, fears,
and fantasies of our shared world.”[1]
Rather than assemble the usual cohort of experts from research universities, the OACCT gathered contributors from a wide variety of institutions, ranging from the Ivy League to the state college, in an effort to represent the wide array of pedagogical and scholarly perspectives on Chaucer studies.
This urgency for such a
capacious companion encouraged the editors forego the usual and prestigious
route to publication—following the stop-and-go guidance of the academic
press—and head for what I would call the “open rogue,” paying no tolls and
speeding along the information superhighway to the humble destination of a
university hosted website. One of the central aims of the project is to explore
“how working outside of traditional publishing frameworks can open up different
ways of reaching an audience and shaping a book, methods governed by the needs
of the field and readers—not the needs of the market.” By abandoning the
initial credential of the academic publisher, the OACCT sacrifices customary
forms of prestige for speed, impact, and audience, effectively wagering that the
quality, utility, and accessibility of the work will distinguish it as a model
for scholarship in its own right. This kind of “doing it anyway,” however, is a
gamble that not all can afford to make. When I decided to submit a chapter, I
was enjoying my post-tenure sabbatical and seeking to participate in
risk-taking projects I had been previously encouraged to avoid. One potential
contributor shared with me that she decided not to submit an essay because of
the repeated warning from mentors and administrators that this work might not
count towards tenure, mostly because the term “open access” would be
misunderstood to mean “not peer-reviewed.” Such misconceptions will continue to
accompany similar publishing efforts, but, as editor Dan Kline emphasized in an
e-mail exchange, “[a] solid peer-reviewed project like this might create a
foothold for the recognition institutions need to grant for this kind of work.”
With over 43,000 site visits since its October 2017 publication, this foothold
is strengthening the OACCT’s potential to climb up the reputation ladder.
Perhaps the most
significant evidence of the OACCT’s dedication to impact and audience is its
facilitation of what editor Brantley Bryant calls a “sustaining and nurturing”
form of open peer review, which asked contributors to display drafts of their
work on CommentPress for
thorough evaluation by invested readers. As I have argued
elsewhere, open review can create transparency within scholarly
evaluation processes, enhance the utility of peer feedback, increase the number
of reviewers, and ultimately maximize the quality of the work. Since the OACCT
is written for readers new to Chaucer, students were also encouraged to
participate in the review—this increased the number of readers of my essay from
the usual two to a staggering seventeen (!). And even though the first round of
peer review is complete and the revised essays are now published, the OACCT is
committed to a perpetually unfinished state (akin to the incomplete nature of
the Tales themselves), calling this incarnation simply its
“first season.” The online nature of the project makes it updatable for
revisions or corrections and expandable for future essay and reference
chapters.
Since the OACCT is written for readers new to Chaucer, students were also encouraged to participate in the review—this increased the number of readers of my essay from the usual two to a staggering seventeen (!).
Most academics have become
accustomed to giving away their work for free (or for meager stipends or
royalties), but few can tolerate the notion that their work will be unread or
inaccessible. The monograph I published in 2013 was made available online a
year later, but I didn’t have free access to the online copy because my
institution’s library did not have a subscription to the database. When I
became a visiting scholar at Harvard during the spring of 2017, the first thing
I did with my library card was download my book, an exhilarating yet depressing
experience. As OACCT editor Candace Barrington noted in an e-mail to me,
“Published resources are difficult for many readers to obtain. While we’re all
aware how book costs hamper students, we often forget what this can mean for
libraries—and not just our libraries, the ones affiliated with
research universities, well-endowed colleges, and strong high schools. Vast
underfunding means public libraries, rural and urban high schools, community
colleges, as well as colleges and universities outside the sphere of Anglophone
privilege are limited (at best) to outdated publications.” Candace has
encountered this impoverishment of library resources in the ongoing Global Chaucers project,
an online archive of post-1945 non-Anglophone versions of the Canterbury
Tales, which range from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales to José Francisco
Botelho’s Contos da Cantuaria. She and her collaborator Jonathan Hsy have
discovered that many of Chaucer’s global translators either have limited access
to up-to-date publications or find recent scholarship unapproachable. The
OACCT, in tandem with projects like Global Chaucers, make a global audience for
Chaucer achievable.
While such an “open rogue”
may be a shortcut to access and impact, I do not believe it’s a sustainable
direction for the future. Projects like the OACCT need the stability offered by
presses dedicated to toll-free or low-cost forms of open access, along with
organizations committed to empowering libraries as institutional homes for
academic scholarship. Many of these, such as punctum books, have been ardently
advocating for a revolution in academic publishing and effectively creating
venues for risk-taking work that never existed before. The Open Library of
Humanities, running a publishing platform through a network of university
subsidies, offers another promising model for such sustainability, one that
makes libraries, not publishing houses, the central station for scholarship. If
this ideal can be achieved, fewer academics will have to hit the road to find
an audience for their scholarly tales. They won’t even have to leave the
library, except maybe to revel in the April showers (#WhanThatAprilleDay2018).
[1] This and the quotations that follow are from the “Information for Contributors” that was written by the OACCT editors. I am very grateful to the editors for their generous answers to my additional questions over e-mail.
Join us again soon for more #EmpowOA Open Insights. See the tweets from a Twitter chat on this topic collected here on Wakelet.