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In the third in a series of
symposia on the changing nature of scholarly communication, the
Brandeis University Libraries invited Dr. John Unsworth to discuss
changes in the publication of humanities scholarship.
Unsworth is Dean and Professor at the Graduate School of Library
and Information Science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign with a joint appointment in the English
Department. A former director of the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia,
Unsworth was also a founding co-editor of Postmodern
Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the
humanities.
Though much of the debate about scholarly publishing has
centered on the Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM)
literature, humanities publishing is also facing significant
changes. Unsworth views these changes as less about the rising cost
of journals and more about the challenge of finding an audience for
the humanities monograph. Several years ago the print run for an
average humanities title was down to 600 copies. Today that number
has shrunk even further to 150. In reaction to these dwindling
print-run numbers, Harvard, Chicago, Minnesota, and other
university presses are exploring a print-on-demand model in a joint
project called BiblioVault.
Unsworth believes there is an audience for the humanities, if
humanists place their work in the right venues. Humanities scholars
are increasingly relying on journal articles for scholarly
communication, because they rarely have time to read longer works
outside their own specialized areas. Unsworth views the future of
humanities as one of more collaboration, similar to the sciences,
because single authors can no longer achieve mastery of a subject.
Unlike in the sciences, where the issue of underdeveloped countries
gaining access to research produced by other countries is central,
Unsworth contends that the goal for the humanities should be to
facilitate access to work being produced by underdeveloped
countries and to provide enhanced connections linking scholars
around the world.
The Scholarly Publishing Group at the Brandeis University
Libraries encourages faculty and others to visit our web page for
additional information on scholarly communication issues.
Related URLs
John Unsworth's
Home Page
http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/
IATH: The Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/
Postmodern
Culture
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html
BiblioVault
http://www.bibliovault.org/
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