Yes, this would almost have to be done on a grant or by donations.Stephen Carlson wrote: ↑July 27th, 2018, 6:40 pm The best way forward as I see it is support from granting agencies. Many of your examples, Dag Haug, Perseus, climate science, etc., all had government grant support. European grant agencies are beginning to insist that the results they fund be open. Unfortunately, this approach requires political support for funding humanities in an increasingly post-Christian, secular world.
The current critical text is funded by UBS, which relies on donations and a business model that wants to recoup their costs through product sales. Getting this text to be truly open will require them to adopt different funding source.
One interesting thing that is changing: there are at least some people in traditional Bible societies that are very interested in becoming more open. And some donors who want to see that happen.
That's quite generally true of publication, but not of corpora. In corpus linguistics, there are quite a few open corpora that are used by multiple researchers. A great deal of the software they use is freely licensed.Stephen Carlson wrote: ↑July 27th, 2018, 6:40 pm I don't see much buy-in from academia. The whole system is structured to professionalize the discipline and freeze out the amateurs. (Heck they even freeze out PhDs who can't get tenure-track jobs!). The barriers to entry are high and expensive, and I'm afraid purposely so. The peer-review standards are such that if you don't have access to a university library (the main subsidy for humanities scholars), it is impossible to write an article that will pass peer-review. You talk about "data," but mastery of the secondary literature is the primary hurdle for peer-reviewed publication. This philosophy of course is fundamentally incompatible with open scholarship.
Another major obstacle to open scholarship is that copyright terms have become so long that the public domain has stopped growing for most of the past 50 years. With the old 28-year term, lots of scholarly editions entered the public domain when they were still current. Not so anymore.
The papers are often published in traditional academic publications. And yes, that can be frustrating, I don't have access to a university library unless I drive in to campus, online access would be tremendously helpful for many things I do. But that's a different problem.