By way of Peter Suber’s Open Access News:
Spiro, Lisa. “Signs that social scholarship is catching on in the humanities.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, March 11, 2008. http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/signs-that-social-scholarship-is-catching-on-in-the-humanities/.
Spiro asks: “To what extent are humanities researchers practicing ‘social scholarship’ … embracing openness, accessibility and collaboration in producing their work?” By way of a provisional answer, she makes observations about “several [recent] trends that suggest increasing experimentation with collaborative tools and approaches in the humanities:”
- Individual commitment by scholars to open access
- Development of open access publishing outlets
- Availability of tools to support collaboration
- Experiments with social peer review
- Development of social networks to support open exchanges of knowledge
- Support for collaboration by funding agencies
- Increased emphasis on “community” as key part of graduate education
She also points to the “growth in blogging” and the proliferation of collaborative bibliographic tools.
