The Universe and I are working towards a better
relationship, in some areas at least.
For example, I am trying to persuade the Universe that if it wants me to
read something it must not put too difficult obstacles between me and that
text. Money is an obstacle.
So, we look for useful things in Open Access resources,
useful books and articles - though sometimes those Open Access resources are
hard to find, hidden deep within academic or commercial publisher web
sites. Come along, Universe, make things
easier...
And, of course, funding bodies need to think again - is
it really Open Access if it is so hard to find...?
I have already mentioned two aggregating web sites, OAPEN
and DOAB, and you can browse those web sites, and, back-tracking, see how
funding decisions and scholarly decisions have made books available there -
very often through European academic publishing houses and funding
bodies... But the net is spreading
wider...
'The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation
based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in
The Hague. OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books. OAPEN
operates two platforms, the OAPEN Library (www.oapen.org), a central repository
for hosting and disseminating OA books, and the Directory of Open Access Books
(DOAB, www.doabooks.org), a discovery service for OA books...'
http://www.oapen.org/home
https://www.doabooks.org/
Directory of Open access Books is provided by OAPEN
Foundation
Very often we can find material of Irish interest, and
Irish Diaspora interest, within DOAB and OAPEN - and I will return to that at a
later date. Again, I have already
mentioned here on Fiddler's Dog the lovely (money-saving) discovery of Mícheál
Briody's lovely book about The Irish Folklore Commission, and Séamus Ó
Duilearga (James Hamilton Delargy) - which became freely available on OAPEN
just when I needed to cite it... Thank
you, Universe.
The Irish Folklore Commission 1935-1970: History,
ideology, methodology Briody, Mícheál Finnish Literature Society / SKS,
Helsinki 2008
http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=617192
Let me now cite something from an overlapping area of
interest - interdisciplinary studies.
Often, usually at the funds-seeking part of a project, I get asked to
advise on the 'interdisciplinary' part of the bid - and I tippy-toe in.
Noting, for example, a remark by Amy E. Earhart - about p.28,
'The blurring of interdisciplinarity with collaboration...'
Challenging Gaps: Redesigning Collaboration in the
Digital Humanities
in
The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age Edited
by Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell
Series: Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism
http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/etlc.9362034.0001.001
(This book is free to read and download on yet another
Open Access site, digitalculturebooks, an imprint of the University of Michigan
Press... Not that easy to find, unless
you already know it is there.)
But let me look briefly at an 'interdisciplinary' moment,
one that is almost the opposite of collaboration - I can look briefly because
the text is open access on the OAPEN web, and you can read it at your leisure.
I read this splendid book by Karl Widerquist and Grant S.
McCall as a study of that moment when we try to be interdisciplinary, but
realise that first of all we have to be critical - one discipline must offer a
critique of another discipline. In this
case Widerquist and McCall ask how and why do modern philosophers use and
perpetuate myths about prehistory? (I
might add that economists and theologians do it too...)
Widerquist, K., & McCall, G. (2017). Prehistoric
Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Retrieved from http://www.oapen.org/record/625284
Would I have come across this book if it were not for DOAB,
OAPEN and Open Access? Thank you,
Universe.
Patrick O'Sullivan
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