Open Access in the Humanities / By Gudrun Gersmann, History Department, University of Cologne
人文科学的开放获取 / 古德伦·葛思盟（科隆大学历史系）

Even though dealing with electronic publication is now a normal part of historians’ or literary scholars’ teaching and research work, the debate on Open Access in the humanities has not met with much response so far. Unlike in the STM disciplines (science, technology and medicine), only a few representatives of the humanities know in detail what Open Access means, let alone comply with the call to archive texts on university servers or discipline-specific repositories. The current attitude towards electronic forms of publication is still predominantly passive. There are a variety of reasons for this. Often it is simply due to ignorance regarding the creation and stability of digital publications. It seems that there is a widespread, albeit false, notion that electronic publishing requires such a high degree of personal data-processing skills that a layperson is not capable of handling it. Another presumption frequently cited is that electronic publications are per se transient and peripheral since their long-term archiving can not be guaranteed. A connected argument often used is that large and important expert contributions can naturally only be presented in books: ‘What are we supposed to do? Read Hegel on our computer screens? That’s out of the question!’The fact that such statements combine two completely unrelated issues, i.e. the question of the medium’s material form and the question of the quality of scholarly texts, is treated as irrelevant. The final worry cited by scholars in the humanities is that if they were to participate in the ‘fun culture’ of the Internet, they would run the risk of losing respectability amongst their peers in the field.
对于历史学家或文学学者，与电子出版物打交道已是正常教学和研究工作的一部分，但在人文科学中，开放获取的争论至今还没有得到太多的响应。不同于科技医学学科，人文学者知道开放获取细节的为数不多，更不用说响应号召，在大学服务器或学科典藏库存档文本。目前对电子形式出版物的态度，基本上仍是被动的。有多种理由，通常只是对数字出版物创建与稳定性的无知。似乎有一种普遍的错误观念，以为电子出版需要高度的个人数据处理技能，外行人无法掌握；另一种经常提到的假设是，电子出版物本身只是暂时的、过渡的，因为其长期存档尚未得到保障。一个常见的理由是，重大的专业贡献只能出现在图书中：“我们该怎么做呢？在计算机屏幕上阅读黑格尔的作品吗？这是不可能的！”事实上，这样的说法包含两个完全无关的议题，即媒体的资料形式与学术文本的质量。人文学者最后的担心是，如果他们参与因特网上的“趣味文化”，他们会有失去同行尊重的风险。

Notwithstanding all these still existing reservations, electronic publications have been able to gain a foothold in the humanities over the past few years. This is true for example regarding the online review journals created in the past 10 years, which have become a permanent fixture of expert discussions, even though the ‘important monographs’ continue to be the main form of publication in history and literary studies.
尽管所有这些看法依然存在，过去几年电子出版物已经在人文科学中站稳脚跟。过去十年来，尽管“重要专著”仍是历史及文学研究出版物的主要形式，在线评审期刊已成为专业讨论的固定模式。

Besides the quality of their book reviews, online review instruments such as sehepunkte (www.sehepunkte.de), which publishes approximately 100 reviews from the fields of history and art history, or the review service of the Berlin mailing list H Soz u Kult (http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/) have successfully established themselves in their field, a main reason being that they can react faster to new publications than printed academic journals.
除了书评的质量，在线评论工具在其领域里已经占有一席之地，如sehepunkte（www.sehepunkte.de/）已经出版约100种历史与艺术史领域的评论，还有柏林邮件列表H Soz u Kult（http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/）的评论服务，其成功的主要原因，是他们对新出版物的反应比印本学术期刊更快。

Without the support of large funding organisations such as the DFG (German Research Foundation) or ministries, Open Access services in the humanities would be inconceivable. Thus, thanks to the North-Rhine Westphalian initiative ‘Digital Peer Publishing’(55), 10 online journals in different fields of expertise have been created since 2004, including zeitenblicke (www.zeitenblicke.de), a history and art-history online journal with a wide readership addressing a specific research focus in every edition. An important and forward-looking factor for the dissemination of the concept of Open Access is doubtless the commitment of learned societies: unlike those societies that pay relatively noncommittal lip-service to Open Access, the German Historians’ Association (Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands, VHD) set up a subcommittee for the area of ‘electronic publications and specialist information’at the historians’ annual congress in Constance in September 2006. The subcommittee has the mandate to develop strategies to strengthen integration of the new forms of publication into their field of studies.
没有如德国研究基金会或政府部门这类大型资助机构的支持，人文领域的开放获取服务是不能想像的。因此，必须感谢北莱茵威斯特伐利亚的“数字同行出版”计划（注55），2004年以来，已出版不同专业领域的10种在线期刊，包括zeitenblicke（www.zeitenblicke.de/）历史和艺术史在线期刊，每一期都有具体的研究重点，颇受读者欢迎。学会的参与，无疑是传播开放获取观念的重要与前瞻性的因素。不同于仅止于口头支持的学会，德国历史学家协会（Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands, VHD）在2006年9月于康士坦茨湖的历史学家年会上，针对“电子出版物与专家信息”成立下属委员会，其任务是制定策略，将新形式的出版物纳入其研究领域。

注55: Digital Peer Publishing NRW - eJournals, http://www.dipp.nrw.de/journals/

This is a central concern, particularly with regard to the next generation of academics, who will definitely benefit from the Internet’s multiplying effect, since every manuscript reproduced electronically by definition has a greater visibility than an article published in little-read journals that may seem somewhat old-fashioned. In the long term, even the humanities will not be able to escape the triumphal march of the new informal forms of communication or publishing known as ‘blogs’ or ‘wikis’, which include experiments with collaborative authorship.
对下一代学者，这是一个特别的主要关注议题，即谁将受益于因特网的相乘效应，因为电子方式生产的文稿，与多少有些过时而少人问津的期刊发表论文相比，显然有较大的曝光率。从长远来看，即使是人文科学，也无法摆脱新的非正式交流或出版形式的凯旋挺进，这些形式被称为“博客”或含合作撰写实验的“维基”。


p. 82-83
开放获取 : 机会及挑战, http://tinyurl.com/dck7v9

Open Access : Opportunities and Challenges. A handbook [开放获取 : 机会及挑战] / European Commission, German Commission for UNESCO. -- Luxembourg : Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2008. -- 144 p., 14.8 x 21.0 cm. -- ISBN 978-92-79-06665-8. -- EUR 23459, http://tinyurl.com/3q8wo5

Open Access : Chancen und Herausforderungen : ein Handbuch. -- Bonn : Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission, 2007. -- 136 Seiten. -- ISBN 3-927907-96-0. http://www.unesco.de/fileadmin/medien/Dokumente/Kommunikation/Handbuch_Open_Access.pdf