The Modern Language Association (MLA) has recently changed its copyright policy to allow authors in its publications to retain copyright. Authors will now be able to include versions of their work on their own web sites and in institutional repositories. Inside Higher Education has this article for more information.
Kevin Smith’s “Saying the right things, then doing them” goes into further detail and analyses what MLA’s shift may do to the humanities.
These 3 points may be most important,
- Open access is not only possible, but is even vitally important, in the humanities.
- Open access, especially in its “green” form of author self-archiving, is not a threat to scholarly societies.
- The value of organized publishing efforts is in the services they provide around the content, not in the content itself (which, of course, the publishers do not create).
