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.