Speaker presentation | Patrick Flack

We have the pleasure to announce the presence of Patrick Flack for the Winter School Session 08 Economy of open access and open data publication

Biography

 Patrick Flack is the managing director of sdvig press, an open access, non-profit academic publishing house. He is also associate member of the Central-European Institute for Philosophy (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague). Since completing his PhD in 2011 (Comparative Literature, Charles University in Prague), he has worked in Helsinki, Leuven and Berlin as a post-doctoral researcher funded by the Swiss National Scientific Foundation. His research focuses on structuralism and a trans-cultural, interdisciplinary approach to its historiography.
With sdvig press, he is currently developing a number of open access thematic platforms – such as the Open Commons of Phenomenogy – designed to function as sustainable infrastructural and communication hubs for their respective scientific communities. The development of these platforms is linked directly with international institutions (Husserl Archives, Czech National Library, etc.), embedding their research projects, archival holdings and editorial outputs.

Abstract

Repository-as-a-Service: An Experimental Model for the Sustainable Curation and Funding of Large Niche Corpora in the Humanities
sdvig press is a non-profit academic publishing platform dedicated to supporting the dissemination and linking of knowledge in the Humanities between Eastern, Central and Western Europe. One of its central mission is to give visibility and provide structured access to large corpora of texts from Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic or the Baltic states, relating in particular to important epistemological paradigms of the Humanities such as structuralism, phenomenology, or critical theory. This objective implies not only the high-quality digitisation of textual sources, but also their translation at least into English. Given the still obscure nature of these corpora, however, it is hard to find anything more than punctual funding, and there is no prospect of even mild commercial success to finance these tasks in the systematic, long-term perspective that they require.
The solution explored by sdvig press is the development of thematic platforms that integrate Central and Eastern European corpora into better defined, more visible and more international contexts. We are developing three prototypes, of which the Open Commons of Phenomenology is the most advanced (the other two are Structuralica and Pacem). Each of these platforms, at first, is conceived mainly as an exhaustive bio-bibliographical repository providing structured access (ideally) to all sources and references in its thematic field. Access to contents is wholly unrestricted, but a number of tools (advance search, lists, visualisations, etc.) are made available only to libraries through a subscription.
The short-term logic of this model is that even a very extensive bibliographical repository is limited in scope (e.g. Phenomenology will include about 250k references, including chapters and articles) and can be produced relatively quickly (1-2 years). Subscriptions from topic-specific libraries or institutes (at least 400 in the case of Phenomenology) can then provide a six-figure yearly budget for the further digitisation, curation and translation of the corpus. Furthermore, by being closely embedded with its research community from the start, the platform also benefits from digital labor from relevant institutions, in the form of blogs, bibliographical inputs, etc.
In the long-term, the constant development of the platform and its increasing role as a crucial infrastructural hub for its research community means that its functionalities can extend beyond the role of a repository, serving as a publication service, a social network and a technical lab for hosting and implementing DH projects. The repository thus becomes a service provided to (and by) researchers – and paid by libraries.

Bibliography and Links

“Open Access for East and West“, https://sdvigpress.org/projet
sdvig press: http://sdvigpress.org
The Open Commons of Phenomenology: http://ophen.org
Phenomenological Reviews: http://reviews.ophen.org
Acta Structuralica: http://acta.structuralica.org

You can find the full Winter School bibliography on Zotero.