Open Access Editor Annual Report 2018

submitted by Kathleen DeLaurenti

List of Previous Goals and Progress Made

• Work with Humanities Commons continues. The OA Editor has continued work on the HC Sustainability Committee, providing feedback on the needs of scholarly societies and the proposed HC business plan that is due to be announced this year.
• The web committee also collaborated with the OA editor to seek contributions of conference materials to HC this past year. Feedback from the MLA membership was very positive about this experience, which provides MLA with a permanent hosting solution to conference proceedings. In addition to conference proceedings, the  board approved the HC Discussion Forum as an official space for membership discussions, governed by the existing MLA Code of Conduct.
• DeLaurenti has researched the status of MLA Series backlist publications and reached out Rowman & Littlefield to gauge access in collaborating on an open edition of the MLA publications that were issued with Scarecrow. Conversations with R&L are ongoing, but current research points to MLA as co-owner of all series publications in the standard contract, and this project may move forward with R&L. Conversations about releasing future publications OA moving forward are also ongoing. These titles would be made permanently available in Humanities Commons, who have agreed to work with MLA for any bulk import of content.
• The board is considering a proposal for a public domain songbook to be issued in 2019 and has approved a collaboration between the Working Group for Archival Description of Music Materials, the Open Access Editor, and the Society of American Archivists to openly publish a music supplement to DACS. This publication should be available late fall 2018. Discussions also continue with Broude Trust about the donation of Trust publications to MLA.

List of Future Goals

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