Closing Keynote: Open Access and Digital Humanities – Opening up to the World

Isabel Galina, (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) gives the
closing keynote for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer
School. For over a decade now Open Access (OA) has fundamentally
changed the way scholarly publishing works. In the Digital
Humanities (DH) the development of new types of scholarly
publications in the form of digital projects presents an
interesting scenario for the continuation of the OA movement. In
this talk I will discuss how DH projects disrupt traditional
scholarly communication and publishing systems, focusing on the
role of authors, editors, publishers and libraries and how as
digital humanists we contribute to shaping these new systems
through the various roles we assume in DH project development.
Additionally, I will discuss how these new DH publishing models may
also serve to increase geographical and linguistic diversity in our
field. Currently research and researchers from peripheral countries
are sorely underrepresented in international scholarly publishing.
Viewing DH as a transformative motor in academia gives us the
opportunity to propose new models that adequately incorporate
digital scholarly output on a global scale and increase the
visibility of countries on the periphery little favoured by the
traditional scholarly publishing model.