P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 49 CSSHE SCÉES Canadian Journal of Higher Education Revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur Volume 39, No. 3, 2009, pages 49-69 http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe A Matter of Discipline: Open Access, the Humanities, and Art History Patrick Tomlin Virginia Tech University ABSTRACT Recent events suggest that open access has gained new momentum in the humanities, but the slow and uneven development of open-access initiatives in humanist fields continues to hinder the consolidation of efforts across the university. Although various studies have traced the general origins of the humanities’ reticence to embrace open access, few have actually considered the scholarly practices and disciplinary priorities that shape a discipline’s adoption of its principles. This article examines the emergence, potential and actualized, of open access in art history. Part case study, part conceptual mapping, the discussion is framed within the context of three interlocking dynamics: the present state of academic publishing in art history; the dominance of the journal and self-archiving repository within open-access models of scholarly production; and the unique roles played by copyright and permissions in art historical scholarship. It is hoped that tracing the discipline-specific configuration of research provides a first step toward both investigating the identity that open access might assume within the humanities, from discipline to discipline, and explaining how and why it might allow scholars to better serve themselves and their audiences. RÉSUMÉ Le mouvement en faveur de l’accès libre, si l’on en croit divers événements récents, semble voir son progrès s’accélérer dans les sciences humaines. Cependant, le développement des initiatives soutenant l’accès libre 50 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 dans les disciplines humanistes continue d’être lent et inégal tout en retardant la consolidation des efforts panuniversitaires. Certaines études ont bien identifié les origines générales des réticences exprimées par les humanistes à l’égard de l’accès libre, mais peu se sont penchées sur les pratiques de la recherche et les priorités qui informent le processus d’adoption l’accès libre par une discipline particulière. Cet article étudie comment l’histoire de l’art a vu l’accès libre émerger d’abord comme une potentialité pour en devenir une réalité. D’une part, étude de cas, d’autre part, problématisation théorique, cet article structure son argument autour de trois dynamiques inter-reliées : l’état présent de la publication savante en histoire de l’art ; le rôle dominant, dans les modèles de production associés à l’accès libre, de la revue savante et des archives ouvertes avec auto-archivage ; et, les rôles spécifiques joués par les questions de droits d’auteur et de permissions en histoire de l’art. En retraçant les contours spécifiques de la recherche dans une discipline donnée, cet auteur espère ouvrir une piste permettant de comprendre quelle forme identifiable l’accès libre pourrait adopter dans le contexte des humanités, discipline par discipline. De cette façon, il devrait être possible d’expliquer comment les chercheurs dans ces domaines pourraient, grâce à l’accès libre, mieux s’entraider et mieux servir leurs lecteurs. INTRODUCTION History tells us that any great transformation in science and technology is always accompanied by an analogous revolution in the arts and humanities. Indeed, it is often only in the act of cultural production, through the work of scholars, writers, artists, philosophers, and performers, that the weight of scientific and technological change is expressed and filtered through the social imagination, in turn bringing about new forms of artistic expression and new world views. This has not been the case with open access, however. Humanists in Canada and the United States have been painfully slow to explore open-access models, even as platforms for delivering free online access to scholarship have radically transformed scholarly communication in the fields of science, technology, and medicine for nearly two decades. Yet recent events suggest that open access has gained new momentum in humanities research. In 2007, for example, the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) launched its Aid to Open Access Journals program, intended, in part, to assess criteria for funding open-access journal publishing. A year later, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities announced a funding program for open-access projects in the humanities, and the Mellon Foundation supported the open-access projects of six society publishers in the humanities. In February 2008, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously approved a mandate requiring faculty to deposit scholar- P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 51 ly articles in its library-operated repository. This was followed, in May of 2009, by the first departmental open-access mandate in the humanities, issued by the University of Oregon’s Department of Romance Languages. But perhaps the most crucial marker of this new involvement was the founding, in 2006, of the Open Humanities Press (OHP), a non-profit open-access publishing collective focused on critical theory. The OHP has assembled an international editorial board comprised of more than two dozen high-profile scholars and open-access leaders, among them Donna Haraway, Jonathan Culler, Wlad Godzich, and Stephen Greenblatt. Collectively, its 10 peer-reviewed journals have done much to raise the visibility and signify the viability of the open-access enterprise in the humanities. Taken together, these events begin to suggest the diversity of policy and practice driving the humanities’ involvement in open access. Nevertheless, the distinctively fragmented fashion in which humanist disciplines have thus far explored open access represents a formidable obstacle to anything resembling a unified field of open-access scholarly production. To isolate and examine the nature of that fragmentation is the general subject of this article. To arrive at an answer, this interrogation is framed through a specific lens or case study, the discipline of art history. Now, this choice would seem to need instant qualification, for art history has been, for a number of reasons, among the most reticent of the humanities to experiment with electronic publishing, let alone open access. Yet that very absence offers a prime opportunity for exploring the critical but frequently overlooked crux of disciplinary specificity, that is, the scholarly practices and institutional expectations that shape, often imperceptibly, the arc of a discipline’s adoption of open-access principles. For although the end result of a transition to open access will always be the same – permanent and free online access to scholarship – it is apparent that the actual trajectory this process assumes will inevitably differ from discipline to discipline. Thus, no matter how “interdisciplinary” a field might characterize itself, the internal conditions managing its definition of what counts for “legitimate” scholarship necessarily regulates how authors produce and regard its literature and, in doing so, marks out the absolute horizon of open access. Art history also offers strategic insight into the discipline-specific process of open-access adoption precisely because it is, in some respects, a liminal or “inbetween” discipline (for practical purposes, no distinction is made here between art history and visual culture studies). Straddling the arts and the humanities, it utilizes the traditional outlets of humanities publishing, the journal article and monograph, but also engages and incorporates a world of artistic production existing outside the domain of the university, within the cultural spaces of the gallery and museum. This quality points to exciting possibilities for future open-access resources, but it also poses thorny questions for the current STMgenerated conceptualization of open-access publishing, a model predominately focused on the journal article, which the humanities have struggled to embrace. 52 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 Why should art historians care about open access? Certainly, there are the widely touted advantages that all scholars and their readers would reap: open access removes the price barriers and many of the permissions’ restrictions limiting the use of scholarly literature. This provides authors greater access to the literature while simultaneously enabling the wider impact of their research. Publishing in open-access journals also aids the beleaguered university library, faced with subscription prices and annual budgets that have moved in opposite directions with baffling speed. But open access also raises thought-provoking questions about how a discipline defines itself, through what it publishes and how it sees its future as it moves into the digital age. Three interlocking dynamics foreground the perspective of the art historianas-author in this article: the present state of art history’s publishing paradigm; the (a)symmetry of that paradigm with dominant open-access journal/repository models; and the unique roles of copyright and permissions in art historical scholarship. It is hoped that tracing the discipline-specific configuration of research provides a first step toward investigating the identity that open access might assume within the humanities, from discipline to discipline, and how and why it might allow scholars to better serve themselves and their audiences. NOT A CRISIS? THE STATE OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING IN ART HISTORY The same digital technology that opened a path to open access has produced notably contradictory results within art history itself. On the one hand, the proliferation of inexpensive image-digitization technology during the late 1990s quickly and irrevocably altered art history pedagogy. Photographic slides and analog projectors were replaced by hi-resolution scans, image databases, and an arsenal of presentation software. Meanwhile, Web-based digital humanities initiatives regularly began to supplement, and in some instances displace, the art historian’s dependence upon on-site archival and museum research, making thousands of works and entire archives of primary-source material available on the Web. On the other hand, digital technology has radically failed to alter the discipline’s methods of providing access to its own research. Art historical scholarship remains bound to the printed page. Above all, it is in the print monograph, the single-author specialized book, that the discipline has invested the bulk of its intellectual and institutional capital. Since the emergence of art history programs within U.S and Canadian higher education during the 1940s and 1950s, the well-illustrated art book has imperviously sustained itself as the principal mechanism for professional legitimation, achieving tenure, and scaling university hierarchies. Unfortunately, the various ideological motivations compelling this commitment to the art monograph are more and more misaligned with the economic realities of academic publishing. In his 2006 rigorous study of scholarly publishing in the field, Lawrence McGill [please add McGill entry to Refs] dem- P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 53 onstrated that, although the number of art history monographs published by university presses enjoyed a considerable rise throughout the 1980s, this period of growth stalled over the next decade. Indeed, utilizing the Bowker Global Books in Print database, McGill surmised that between 2000 and 2004 the publication of single-author art history monographs declined by 16%. Using the same measuring parameters revealed that as of 2008, this figure had levelled off somewhat, the number of publications increasing since 2004 by roughly 9% but still falling short of the levels attained during the early 1990s. Further tempering this growth is the fact that art historical monographs account for 3% of all university press publications, and eight university presses have represented 57% of that figure over the past 50 years. Add to this that the number of PhDs granted in art history is outstripping the production of art monographs — increasing on the order of 104 degrees, or 8% a year — and the picture becomes bleaker (McGill, 2006). When Cambridge University Press, one of those eight publishers, announced in 2005 that it would cut its list of art books in half, it understandably sent nervous reverberations across the field. This two-decade trend of progressive growth and measured decline corresponds with an overall weakening of activity in North American humanitiesbased scholarly publishing. But it also speaks to the specific costs associated with producing an illustrated book. Press editors surveyed by Ballon and Westermann (2006) put the total cost of a standard 300-page hardcover art history title, from proofs to publication, at approximately $41,400. This figure stands in stark distinction to the estimated $23,000 that a university press invests in publishing a hardcover without illustrations. Based on data presented by seven academic and commercial art publishers gathered for the 2006 conference “Art History and Its Publishers” at the Clark Institute in Massachusetts, art history titles cost, on average, an astounding three times more than general humanities titles to produce (Soussloff, 2006). For this reason, university and museum publishers now put a question to the academic art book that would have seemed unthinkable two decades ago: Does it have a market to justify the progressively unrecoverable expense of its production? If presses are no longer guided solely by the rigour of a manuscript’s originality or intellectual engagement but must now consider opportunities for cost recovery and the fluctuating tastes of mass audiences, still other points of stability are also disappearing. Partly due to disparities between the prices of humanities texts and those of the STM fields, partly due to their own budgetary woes, most university libraries have reduced the number of art history monographs they acquire. Commercial booksellers stock fewer academic art history texts. A number of large-scale museums have, with some controversy, replaced shelf space once designated for books with exhibition-related merchandise (Lyon, 2006). Generally speaking, sales of academic art history monographs have dropped; on average, 300 copies can be expected to sell, less than half the amount of a decade ago (Ballon & Westermann, 2006). 54 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 Despite the ease with which information is now disseminated on the Web, the points of contact between scholars and their audience – and thus the capacity to increase the circulation of their ideas – are actually diminishing. Indeed, when it comes to print, it is not authors but various and sundry third parties, beginning with the publisher, who set the terms for access to research that has been funded and produced by someone else. For all its entrenchment as the emblem of scholarly inquiry in art history, the monograph is proving a problematic vehicle for the spread of research. This pervasive reliance upon a corporatized and constricted mechanism for the dissemination of scholarship partly accounts for art history’s reluctance to adopt and adapt open-access publishing. Until this point it has had little impetus to participate in the debate surrounding the escalating prices of academic literature and the evolving electronic outlets for scholarly communication. The discipline’s silence also underscores the relatively minor role that the humanities have played in the open-access movement. If the steady increase in ominous conferences and worrisome state-of-thefield reports devoted to “the crisis in scholarly publishing” – bearing such gloomy appellations as “How Can I Get Tenure if You Won’t Publish My Book?” and “The Art Book’s Last Stand?” – is an indication, concern is mounting. Even in art history, perhaps the last discipline to relinquish the symbolic value of the paperand-ink monograph, the discrepancy is clear: the print volume functions as the hinge of tenure and promotion in the humanities, yet the infrastructure ensuring the continuation of the academic monograph has never been more delicate. Yet it is also increasingly evident that this “crisis,” now entering its third decade, is in reality only one symptom of a much larger transformation in the dissemination of scholarly knowledge. The reductionist rhetoric of calamity pervading most discussions of academic publishing is misleading, insofar as it implies that things will one day return to a prior state of normalcy, when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The developments in and around art history traced in the sections that follow point to the potential, as well as the limitations, of disciplinary engagement of open-access models as alternatives to a fragile publishing ecosystem. Certainly, accounting for the discipline’s haphazard reception of the open-access movement entails considering the relative hold of the larger publishing apparatus through which its scholarly literature is produced. But it also means analyzing the broader consequences of digital technology for the symbolic value of the monograph, a genre that art historians have traditionally prized, and the extent to which making scholarship freely available online complicates that long-standing relationship. OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS AND MONOGRAPHS At present two open-access models have emerged as a solution to the price and permissions barriers erected by academic publishers: the open journal, or “gold OA,” and archiving scholarly content in an open repository, or “green OA.” Both forms may ultimately transform the landscape of scholarly commu- P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 55 nication, but it is “gold” journal production that has received the most attention from authors. There are a number of reasons why the journal format, despite the heightened disciplinary status of the monograph, would initially appear the more immediately attractive step to attaining open access in art history. First, there are no differences in the editorial practices, indexing, or bibliographic conventions between a fee-based scholarly journal in an electronic format and an open-access journal; the latter is simply free for the user. Second, the open-access journal has already proven as economically viable as its subscription-based print and electronic counterparts. Finally, publishing in peer-reviewed open-access journals conforms more closely to art history’s established publishing tenets than does archiving materials in a repository, a process discussed below. Still, it is evident that critical differences exist between the publishing traditions of the STM fields, in which gold OA originated, and that of the humanities, making the case for an unequivocal embrace of the science model virtually impossible. To give only one example, the logic of author fees, the economic fulcrum of roughly 47% of open-access journals in the sciences, is foreign to the soil of humanities publishing (Kaufman & Wills, 2005; Research Information Network & Universities UK, 2009). It is widely recognized that humanists lack the same level of funding for which scientists compete; indeed, in the United States, five foundations provide nearly one-quarter of funding for the humanities, and the humanities have witnessed a slightly decreased share of overall foundationgiving since 1992 (Renz, Lawrence, & Smith, 2004)[please add entry to Refs]. And although multiple universities have developed author funds to defray the costs of open-access publishing and an increasing number of grants allows for the addition of provisions for author-side fees associated with publishing research, their infiltration in the humanist disciplines has been limited (Suber, 2005). It could, of course, be argued that art historians indirectly pay for a portion of the costs of their own literature through memberships to societies with publishing functions, such as the College Art Association or the Society of Architectural Historians, whose journals are among the most respected of the field. A society journal functions as a device for scholarly communication, but the reputation of the society also legitimizes the literature. Harder still to dispel is the tenacious notion, found across the discipline and from society to society, that the electronic journal is still less scholarly (read: falling short of the disciplinary standards for editing, authoritativeness, and prestige) than its print cousin. It is a bias grounded in a structure of tenure and credentialing that privileges the print monograph, but a bias that is undoubtedly compounded by the minimal graphic design and limited usability of some humanities open-access journals (Ballon & Westermann, 2006). Presently at least, the sheer lack of open-access art history journals would seem to reinforce the apparent truth of such convictions. At the time of writing, there were 4,272 peer-reviewed journals listed in the Lund University Libraries’ Directory of Open Access Journals, the most comprehensive such index. Of 56 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 these, 60 belong to its “arts and architecture” category (music and performing arts excluded), and only 5 fall specifically within its art history subcategory (a misleading number, since multiple art history journals appear in the “arts in general” subcategory but not the former). To put that figure in perspective, the total number of business journals stands at 182. Within the domain of the humanities, a respectable 127 history journals are listed. Of the total number of arts journals, 12 originate in the United States and 2 are published in Canada. Upon further examination, however, such a blunt snapshot blurs the striking range and specialization of the journals that have actually thrived in the open-access environment. Consider the following three examples: 1. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (NCAW, www.19thc-artworldwide. org/) has been published by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA), an affiliated society of the College Art Association, since 2002. According to its home page, the journal is “the world’s first scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.” NCAW highlights the level of impact that open access makes possible. Measuring readership via the site’s host server and using only the most conservative counting device, the number of “sessions” conducted at NCAW each month is impressive. In May 2003, for example, the journal saw 11,012 sessions. Although this likely does not translate into 11,012 individual readers, it could easily mean more than 6,000 readers — a remarkable achievement for any publication in the field of art history, which can expect average circulations of 600 to 1,300 copies internationally. Support for NCAW comes in the form of a subsidy from the AHNCA, as well as, interestingly, international media company Pearson and New York-based gallery owners Bodo and Rehs and Schiller, who are given unobtrusive advertising space on the journal’s home page. 2. Tout-Fait (www.toutfait.com) is dedicated to the study of the modern artist Marcel Duchamp. Founded in 1998 by the artist Rhonda Roland Shearer and scientist Stephen Jay Gould, it is published by cyberBOOK+, the publishing branch of the non-profit Art Science Research Laboratory. Refereed articles are posted as they are approved; the site itself is updated with Duchampian news items, exhibition reviews, and multimedia as they appear. Tout-Fait has an equally imposing four-year visitor count of more than 200,000. Even more arresting is its array of content beyond the param- P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 57 eters of the print academic journal: in addition to scholarly articles, the site includes interviews with artists and scholars, audio files, real-time news and exhibition updates, and digitized archival material. It is as much repository as journal, in other words, and utilizes the specificity of the digital format to transgress the aesthetic and physical limitations of the print medium in a manner that both extends and radically departs from that medium. 3. Invisible Culture (www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture), a journal of contemporary visual culture, has been open access since its inception in 1998. Affiliated with the University of Rochester, new content appears biannually. Support comes from the University’s Office of the Provost; the site’s technical infrastructure is maintained with support from the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. Invisible Culture also makes little distinction between its function as a journal and the capability for hybridization intrinsic to the digital medium. The straightforwardness of its design belies the complexity of the content of each issue, which includes, alongside articles, virtual exhibitions and artist projects. These open-access journals pass no publication costs on to contributors and are of course free for the reader. Selection, editing, and refereeing of articles are carried out by scholars in the field, largely by volunteering their time, already a common practice throughout the humanities. Authors retain the copyright to their articles and thus the ability to archive, distribute, and re-use post-prints. And these are only three examples. Additional models for open-access periodical production have also succeeded in other disciplines, including offering free journal content online alongside subscription-based print copies. Several publishers, most notably Oxford University Press, have experimented with “switching” some of their subscription journals to total open access. Still other business models, such as library publishing, have yet to be fully explored (Suber, 2004). That the discussion has so far focused almost exclusively on open-access journals is testament not only to the hold of the open-access model imported from the STM disciplines but also to the complicated issues surrounding the open-access monograph. How will it be subsidized? How will it factor into tenure requirements? What are the legal concerns associated with its production? As practical issues related to gold and green access are clarified, as the humanities become more involved in open-access debates, and as the material circumstances for academic print publishing continue to decline, more of the movement’s energies will undoubtedly shift to the monograph. For the moment it remains grey territory. Several presses have developed sophisticated mechanisms for making online monographs freely available; the National Academies Press, for instance, 58 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 has for several years made some of its books free on the Web to increase sales of its print copies. But the bulk of humanities-based open-access activity looms on the horizon. The Open Humanities Press has committed to a monograph series continuing its broad focus on cultural theory, to be edited by members of its high-profile editorial board, while Bloomsbury Publishing projected more than 50 open-access publications in the humanities and social sciences by the end of 2009. Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), a consortium of six university and museum presses, also announced its Online Library of openaccess books will appear in 2010, with print-on-demand capabilities (Albanese, 2008[please add to Refs]; Jöttkandt, 2008). The concurrent implementation of open-source software for monograph production has the potential to widen the field of open-access publishing even further. Engineered by John Willinsky, Open Monograph Press (OMP) is designed to expedite the publishing of peer-reviewed scholarly monographs (as well as edited volumes and anthologies) both online and in print by reducing costs and providing an adaptable system for submission, editing, and refereeing. Similar in concept to the widely used Open Journal System, also created by Willinsky, OMP operates entirely online. Free for universities to use and distribute, the system is intended to give libraries a significant hosting role and scholars an increased degree of control over editorial and reviewing decisions. Books can be viewed online, as well as printed. The project receives financial support from a number of Canadian and U.S. institutions, including Simon Fraser University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and Stanford University (Willinsky, 2009). Although tentative, these developments speak to the urgency with which a small but exceedingly dynamic coterie of advocates are grappling with the form that open access might assume in the otherwise reticent fields of the humanities and, more importantly, how it might be sustained. This commitment stands in stark contrast to the majority of activity within art history itself: most art historians have avoided addressing the wider implications of the transformation that digital technologies have enacted upon teaching and research for their individual scholarly production, while society-based subventions for publishing have been reduced as the result of external economic pressures (Sousloff, 2006). The full potential of e-publishing, and thus the potential of the open-access journal and monograph, remains to be investigated by the discipline. As publications like Tout-Fait suggest, the discipline’s deep, almost curatorial connection to two- and three-dimensional works, performance pieces, and multimedia make it a prime candidate for exploring and extending the enhancement of scholarship through the extensive interactivity and hybridized forms of communication that digitization fosters, from media-sharing to data visualization to collaborative peer/reader engagement. The multi-layered nature of the online environment may ultimately render the difference between monograph and journal, as legitimizing modes of publication, arbitrary and insufficient. P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 59 THE PERMISSIONS PARADIGM The professional rewards of publishing a refereed article or book have for decades outweighed the concomitant loss of authorial rights enacted by the transfer of copyright that is part and parcel of most publisher’s agreements (Hoorn & van der Graaf, 2006)[please add to Refs]. Redressing this imbalance and retaining the right to publish and distribute a work has historically played a critical role in conceptualizing the importance of open access for scholars, yet few studies have actually addressed how copyright shapes the process of research. Although there are many ways to characterize the discipline of art history from a methodological standpoint, all of them would probably start with one central component, that of its deeply dialogic relationship to the work of art. One corollary of this relationship is that art historians must rely upon the inclusion of reproductions of artworks in articles and books to make their arguments in text. It is precisely this dependence that binds them to a progressively limiting realm of copyright permissions and licensing costs. Nowhere is the issue of permissions more pressing than in art history. Simply put, for all that digitization has enabled the rapid and inexpensive reproduction of images, it has never been a more protracted and expensive process to get them (legally) published. To do that, the author must first determine the work’s copyright status. After this issue is resolved, an image must be secured for reproduction in the journal or book. And to do that, use permission must be granted from the work’s copyright holder and the institution or entity providing said reproduction, should they be different. Completing these two tasks entails traversing a landscape populated by a singularly varied ensemble: museums, galleries, artists’ rights societies, trusts, collectors, dealers, and artists. Scaling this daunting terrain of laws, regulations, and private interests means entering a labyrinthine thicket of intellectual property law and confronting a system that transcends any single institution or its licensing department. The proprietary preoccupations engendered by this “culture of permissions,” as editor Susan Bielstein labelled it in her penetrating 2006 study of the subject (tellingly subtitled A Survival Guide), frequently collides head-on with the principles of open access. It is easy to see how the overregulation of copyright and use permissions might impede art history’s adoption of open access. Although copyright law is justly designed to protect the intellectual and commercial interests of artists (or their estate, heirs, etc.), the pseudo-copyright right to control use of reproductions that many institutions and individuals assert necessarily restricts the circulation of scholarship using images. It also treats scholarship that does not generate profit as if it did, fostering a climate that burdens authors to seek permission for any use, including some that exist squarely within the domain of fair use, and frustrating the potential to reach wider audiences. Further, the increasingly prohibitive price of licensing reproductions for journal articles and monographs undermines the open-access commitment to removing price barriers to access. According to a 2004 report issued by the 60 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 American Association of Museums (AAM), purchasing the right to reproduce a copyrighted image ranges, on average, from $50 to $1,500 or more, depending on the amount of payment to the rights holder, the projected print run, how large the reproduction will be, its placement within the publication, whether it will appear in colour or black and white, and so forth. Typical costs for scholars needing high-quality images for their book can reach $10,000, but that figure can easily double for a heavily illustrated text (American Association of Museums, 2004; Lyon, 2006). In instances where the work exists in the public domain, there is no copyright claim. For this reason issues of copyright and use permissions are ostensibly more pressing for scholars of modern and contemporary art than for, say, scholars studying 19th-century or Renaissance art. But a work’s public domain status hardly precludes its consignment to a closed-access online collection (Bielstein, 2006). It also does not prevent the image holder from asserting copyright over the reproductions they supply and charging accordingly. Various solutions to the mounting encumbrance of image permissions have been proposed, from departmental or disciplinary subventions to a centralized rights-clearing organization operated by art historians, but a wide-ranging solution remains uncertain (see, e.g., Alonso, Davidson, Unsworth, & Wilthey, 2003; Ballon & Westermann, 2006). What is clear is that an absence of consistent licensing and pricing methods only compounds an already time-consuming and frequently frustrating undertaking. The use of copyrighted images in digital publications like open-access journals, furthermore, is still terrain vague; if anything, figures reported by the AAM (2004) survey and Ballon and Westermann (2006) suggest that prices have increased despite, or because of, the infinite reproducibility of digital copies. Intellectual property law has not been able to keep up with the perpetually evolving digital environment (Bearman & Trant, 1997). But what of fair dealing (or its U.S. counterpart, fair use)? Insofar as it serves as a refuge from the rapidly expanding privatization and commodification of information, fair dealing would seem a natural ally for the open access-minded. The first thing to point out is that the doctrine of fair dealing/use differs between the two countries; on the whole, Canadian exceptions to the exclusive rights of copyright holders are fewer than in the United States. Regardless of nationality, however, art historians have generally fared worse than their fellow humanists. While scholars of, say, critical theory can excerpt up to 500 words from a single text to make their arguments, such rigidly quantitative measures fall short when applied to the image — for what is the visual equivalent of 500 words? The instance is rare that an author’s argument will call for a detail of an image without an accompanying reproduction of the entire work. Fair dealing/use is even less applicable for art historical monographs, since publishers and authors can expect some amount of revenue (Ballon & Westermann, 2006). A number of art historical societies, including the College Art Association, have begun to call for more aggressively regulated permissions policies as a means of freeing scholarship from overzealous copyright control (CAA website, 2009). P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 61 The widespread attention that Creative Commons licensing has garnered since its establishment in 2001 is also beginning to make headway in museums and art historical scholarship. The multiple licences under the CC umbrella give a variety of options whereby authors and artists can protect their works while still permitting a variety of “open” or fair uses based on criteria they set, and these have already been utilized by open-access publishers in the sciences, most notably the Public Library of Science and Biomed Central. Ultimately, both the uneven distribution of rights repeatedly highlighted by the open-access movement and the culture of image permissions so astutely analyzed by Bielstein (2006) require the same remedy: rights holders must consent in advance of publication to unrestricted access and the contingent uses of content, from downloading to duplication to linking, that digitization facilitates. Striking a balance between the interests of the rights holder and those of the researcher depends on the willingness of the various rights holders involved: the artist, the gallery owner, the collector, the museum, the journal publisher, the author. They, not copyright law, have the power to mitigate hurdles to providing open-access literature. Signs of progress are materializing. Significantly, they have come from museums rather than art history. Kenneth Hamma of the J. Paul Getty Museum, for instance, has illuminated the financial and societal benefits of making public-domain works held in museum collections freely accessible on the Web (Hamma, 2005). His advocacy for a business model that utilizes rather than attempts to forestall the reproductive capabilities of digital technology has been supported by other museums in North America and Europe, some more dependent on licensing revenue than the Getty. As Hamma recognizes, the museum is perhaps the most strategically positioned to transform the stranglehold of current intellectual property practices. In 2006, the UK’s Victoria and Albert Museum announced that it would make hi-resolution digital images from its online collections available to scholars free of charge for academic purposes, including publication. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) soon followed, partnering with ARTstor, a nonprofit image database created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish Images for Academic Publications (IAP). The project initially made more than 2,000 digital images of works from the museum’s collection available online for use in royalty-free scholarly publishing; that number has since increased to nearly 10,000. Images are free of charge for articles and books with print runs of less than 2,000 and may be self-archived, though some still require permission from third-party rights holders. The database is currently accessible only to scholars whose institutions are subscribers to ARTstor, however. THE DISCIPLINARY ARCHIVE The embryonic state of open-access journals in art history would seem to present the discipline with an opportunity to explore additional open-access models more attuned to its specific needs. One option is “green OA,” or self- 62 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 archiving. Here, authors post electronic copies of pre-prints or peer-reviewed post-prints to freely accessible online repositories managed by their respective institutions or through collaboration with other individuals and organizations in their discipline. Why self-archive? The pragmatic benefits of e-print archiving for authors have been studied extensively in the sciences over the past decade. Some have been proven repeatedly: self-archiving maximizes the agency of authors by minimizing the steps and intermediaries to providing others access to their research; archived post-prints find readers sooner — as soon as they are refereed, in fact, and thus weeks or months before they could appear in print form — thereby increasing the speed and reach of citation impact from between 50% to 250%; archiving minimizes redundancy and allows for ongoing revision; and archiving can actually increase sales and circulation of print versions of articles (Antelman, 2004; Harnad & Brody, 2004; Suber, 2005). Any one of these factors is reason enough for art historians to take open-access self-archiving seriously. Indeed, a number of humanities scholars and institutions have already developed subject repositories to create a shared network of freely available research. Archives such as CSeARCH, the cultural studies archive created by Gary Hall and Steve Green, The Kultur Consortium, the recently launched visual arts repository based at the University of Southampton, or The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics indicate the repository’s different economies of scale. Why create a disciplinary archive? As some have noted, the status enjoyed by the working paper or pre-print in the sciences is mostly absent in the humanities, which presumably weakens the case for self-archiving (Suber, 2005). But in addition to e-prints, an open-access subject repository would create centralized access to a range of art historical materials existing outside the scope of academic publishers. Thus, as well as providing an alternative to constrictive networks of communication, the principal strength of the disciplinary archive rests in its ability to cast its net narrowly and deeply across an entire field, attributing new value to underused content. Drawing on Hall’s (2008) work in cultural studies, a brief list of archivable discipline-specific content might include conference proceedings, e-theses and dissertations, book chapters, scanned public domain and out-of-print texts, learning objects, and Festschriften. More important, monographs can be added to such an inventory, since open-access archiving does not prevent the commercial sale of print copies of the same text (Hall, 2008). Where reproductions of copyrighted works of art are concerned, the legality of the deposit would depend, again, on the cooperation of the rights holder or the context of reproduction use. From a practical perspective, it has never been easier or cheaper to develop or contribute to a digital archive. When shouldered by a collaborative of art history departments and societies, the modest fixed costs of an archive’s technical operation (software, hosting and server space, part-time staff) are eminently achievable. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and databases such as OAIster have made it easier to P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 63 locate materials across repositories. The time it takes to upload a document to a repository is, on average, 10 minutes (Harnad & Carr, 2005)[please add to Refs], whether it is carried out by the author or outsourced to a librarian or repository technician. This is not to say that obstacles to a spontaneous and widespread outburst of self-archiving by art historians are non-existent. Above all, a disciplinary repository requires the unique investment of authors, authors who not only self-archive but are also willing to use the repository in the course of their own research. Failing to do so provokes a vicious cycle: the art historian’s incentive to upload e-prints or other materials rapidly dissipates if the repository itself fails to register as an essential research tool (Guédon, 2004). Presently, repository-searching is not an instinctual component of the humanist’s bank of research strategies, and repository content ranks low on the ladder of reputable scholarship. To most art historians, self-archiving might resemble an electronic version of the vanity press. Authors will fill a subject repository only when such misconceptions are met with evidence – evidence originating from within art history – of the advantages of self-archiving. With any luck, the growing number of university- and humanities-based mandates requiring automatic self-deposit of post-prints upon acceptance for publication will spark further discussions within the discipline. A second and arguably more obdurate deterrent to self-archiving is the repository’s apparent lack of quality control. Refereeing has proven a bedrock practice for the art history journal article (rejection rates to refereed humanities journals are on the order of 85%) and for the monograph, albeit to a lesser extent. As a result, one could reasonably suppose that refereeing will remain aligned with the central procedures of scholarly publishing even after a transition to open access occurs (Howard, 2009). Open-access repositories, however, do not perform peer review. Making pre-prints freely available through an archive is based on the desire to foster an exchange of ideas as broadly as possible. It is also driven by the principle that the value of a work is established naturally by the gatekeeping parameters a research community establishes over time. Scholarship falling short of those parameters is simply less used by scholars. Self-archiving is not publishing. Steven Harnad, an outspoken advocate of self-archiving, has also pointed out that many worries about peer review are the result of a conflation of the two: “The author self-archives both pre-refereed pre-prints and refereed post-prints (etc.). The peer review continues to be performed by the referees as it always was. Peer-review is medium-independent” (Harnad, 2001, n.p.). Authors can also record, in supplementary documentation, changes that have been made to an archived pre-print (to which they own the copyright), book chapter, or monograph once the text has been edited, commented upon by referees, and accepted for publication. This “corrigenda strategy” does not infringe on the existing copyright agreement between the author and the publisher (Harnad, 2001). 64 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 In fact, many publishers are already amenable to post-print archiving, an opportunity that art historians have largely failed to utilize. Of 10,190 journals produced by 523 publishers, 6,440 journals and 268 publishers, or roughly 63%, allow the free and unrestricted deposit of post-prints [http://romeo.eprints.org/ stats.php, accessed July 19, 2009]. Although the vast majority of those publishers are in STM fields, they also include publishers of art history journals, such as MIT Press and Cambridge University Press. Other publishers enforce limited time restrictions. For example, Routledge, publisher of Word & Image, History of Photography, and numerous other journals, prohibits self-archiving of postprints within 18 months of publication in the arts and humanities. However, since the greater mass of art historical journals are published not by large university presses but by smaller societies and associations across North America and Europe, their policies on self-archiving are not readily accessible or, even more troubling, are altogether non-existent. It bears noting that open-access self-archiving only complements “gold” journal production. Because it is not publishing, it does not supplant open-access journals or even subscription-based scholarly publications. Nor is it meant to. Its significance rests in allowing scholars to bypass many of the re-use/redistribution restrictions of most commercial and academic publishing agreements without disrupting the conventions that currently facilitate traditional journal and monograph publishing. Although the time between publication and point of impact of art historical scholarship can be much longer than the sciences, self-archiving need not impinge on any potential publishing revenue, even in cases where the publisher has established an embargo on newer literature. For this reason self-archiving might just be the most radical decision art historians could make about their own intellectual production. Gary Hall has pointed out that, although the majority of open-access journals replicate the essential template of print journals, publishing in digital repositories is newer and less familiar to most people [in the humanities] than publishing in journals, even electronic ones. Open-access archiving may thus require academics to make a larger shift in their thinking and scholarly practices if it is to be accepted than would open access journal publishing. (2008, p. 163) For a discipline that has only conservatively engaged electronic scholarship, the repository stands at a distinct remove from its existing methods for conducting and disseminating research. Nevertheless, because it holds the potential to enable scholars to exponentially expand the audience for their research, even to revise and enhance it on a continual basis, self-archiving offers a sophisticated response to an atrophied and contracted publishing sphere. CONCLUSION: OPEN ACCESS ART HISTORY - A GLOBAL DISCIPLINE? “What is the shape, or what are the shapes, of art history across the world? Is it becoming global — that is, does it have a recognizable form wherever it is practiced?” These are the provocative questions with which art historian James P. Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 65 Elkins (2007a) opened a recent volume of essays on the subject of global thinking within the discipline, (p. 3). They reflect a growing concern among art historians about the significance of globalization for the theory and practice of art history. Is art history global? This is a question that open access can begin to answer. For, regardless of whether the focus is on “gold” or “green” routes, all open-access models of scholarly communication are explicitly based on the widespread democratization of knowledge. Commitment to this “access principle,” as John Willinsky has called it, represents not only a recognition that open access can lead to increased impact; it also means accepting the scholar’s obligation to making the fruits of research available as broadly as possible. “To find new ways of increasing access is to extend an invitation and to acknowledge a right,” Willinsky notes, “for scholarship exists only as it is shared and circulated, only as it is open to new and diverging voices” (2006, p. 32). Although uneven economic and technological growth will remain an obstacle to universal open access, it is not difficult to see how even modest extensions of access into access-impoverished regions could benefit researchers and institutions incapable of commitment to high-priced journals and monographs. But the opposite is true as well: the advantages of open access swim upstream, too, and not just in terms of citation increases and impact factors. Free and permanent online access to worldwide art historical literature has the potential to reconfigure how a discipline understands itself in potentially powerful ways. Elkins (2007b) has demonstrated the compelling extent to which much non-Western art history remains invisible to Western audiences, and vice versa, due to startling gaps in the indexes of European and North American (toll-access) research databases. By contrast, robust indexing of open-access journals, monographs, and self-archived papers can illuminate the full geographical distribution of art historical research. Point-of-origin data culled from repository records and journal usage logs could present a compelling picture of the depth and breadth of art history’s spread. Such a framework for comparing the discipline’s activities and its audiences on a global scale might hold the seeds of a paradigm shift in how art historians understand the nature of their research and the diversity of their methodologies. But such a transformation can only take place if the discipline first considers the nature of its role in the debates over open access, digital communication, academic publishing, and the system of institutional legitimation. Self-archiving of e-prints is a necessary first step, as is the creation of more avenues for experimentation with open-access journals. University mandates are a critical aspect; however, open-access art history will almost certainly require the involvement of its societies at the level of policy-making and subsidies, particularly the College Art Association and the Universities Art Association of Canada, and partnerships with museums. Copyright and permissions presents a tremendous barrier, but one that might fall through active dialogue with the museum community and the establishment of standards for legal and ethical use of reproductions that balance the interests of both rights holders and image users. 66 CJHE / RCES Volume 39, No. 3, 2009 Normalizing open access as a mode – the mode – of scholarly publishing will require a fundamental sense of self-reflexivity, a rigorous re-evaluation not only of the place of the monograph and journal article within the academic credentialing apparatus. It will also require accepting, even embracing, that the technology that has so impacted the sciences has, like elsewhere in the humanities, also altered art history and holds still greater changes for its scholarship waiting in the wings. 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Tomlin / A Matter of Discipline 69 CONTACT INFORMATION Patrick Tomlin Virginia Tech University Blacksburg, VA 24062-9001 [email protected] Patrick Tomlin is Head of the Art and Architecture Library at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is currently completing a doctoral degree in art history at Northwestern University.