American Historical Association

131st Annual Meeting (January 5-8, 2017)

January 05 - 08, 2017

Conversations about open-access publishing tend towards the extremes: partisans often tout open access as a revolutionary response to deeply flawed or even reactionary models of scholarly communication; opponents warn that open-access portends the demise of standards and even scholarship itself. In this panel we hope to move beyond the messianic and apocalyptic rhetoric to more practical and concrete questions. What specific problems and challenges surrounding the production and dissemination of history monographs do open-access models seek to address? What new, open-access initiatives have arisen in recent years? In what ways are those efforts succeeding, struggling, or both? The AHA’s director of scholarly communication, a university press director, a librarian, and an editorial director—all in the thick of open-access publishing—will offer thoughts on general issues and particular cases.