Open access and academic publishing – an interview with Dr. Martin Paul Eve

The current state of academic publishing is something we should all be thinking about, given that it’s a means of disseminating the knowledge generated by academic research — much of which is publicly funded yet inaccessible to the public. Publishing is also significant because of the key role it plays in academic careers, where it serves as a gatekeeping mechanism. Changes to academic publishing both reflect, and contribute to, broader trends within academe; and they point to a range of critical questions. Within the contexts and constraints of established institutions and practices, what possibilities are opened up by recent technologies and new organisational forms? How could publishing change in (and differ across) the various academic areas and fields? How might the increased competition for academic jobs, and the smaller proportion of scholars with permanent positions, affect publishing and associated labour? Can we maintain the accessibility and quality of publications and the process of peer review while also ensuring compensation for the work involved? What about digital publication and circulation – will (paywalled) journal publishing eventually become obsolete? This post explores some of those questions by way of an interview with Professor Martin Paul Eve, who is an all-round expert on, and active promoter of, open access academic publishing. Professor Eve is chair of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. Among many other things, Professor Eve also gave evidence to the U.K. government’s business, innovation and skills committee inquiry into open access, in 2013, and with Dr. Caroline Edwards he is a co-founder of the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH), in which 16 Canadian institutions are already participating. The following interview focuses on OLH and on the issues of access to knowledge (in the form of peer-reviewed research) that underlie its creation