I was last week participating as one of the 19 grantees in the European Science Foundation Humanities Spring workshop on changing publishing cultures in humanities organised by An Foras Feasa, NUI Maynooth in Ireland. We were a good group from around the Europe representing a variety of humanities disciplines from history, archaeology, linguistics and literature to digital humanities, and yes, for sure, information science. In spite of the rather diverse backgrounds, it was quite refreshing to talk with people who were apparently concerned with similar kinds of things and for real, thought about the future of publishing, scholarly communication and information dissemination in the different fields of humanities. Apart from the often very sharp and to the point discussions we had an opportunity to listen to a number of invited speakers including Gudrun Gersmann from the German Historical Institute (Paris) to Poul Holm (Trinity College Dublin), Karen Skovgaard-Petersen (The Royal Library, Copenhagen) and Péter Dávidházi (Hungarian Academy of Sciences). The main point of the workshop was not to really the already existing examples, but I must admit that this was the first time I heard about a print version of an electronic journal (from Denis Fomin-Nilov, Russian Academy of Sciences), Storify.com (credits to whom deserve them) and recensio.net.
There will be more about the results of the discussions later this year in form of a manifesto. Stay tuned.
