Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?

A column by Roy Rosenzweig

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2005/0504/0504vic1.cfm

Excerpt:
These proposals range from the incremental to the revolutionary. Some (library cooperatives, for example) would require scholarly societies like the AHA to dramatically alter their ways of doing business; others (such as partial access) would, in my view, have little effect on the Association’s revenues. Regardless of one’s view of the merits of open access (and my own position is obviously in favor of much freer access), these approaches require careful consideration by historians—if only because external pressures (from government, from the rising tide of the open access movement) are likely to force us to re-evaluate our policies sooner or later. But the more important reason to consider how we can achieve open access is that the benefits of broad and democratic access to scholarship—benefits that are within our grasp in a digital era—are much too great to simply continue business as usual.

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