I’d like to consider The Directory of Open Access Journals among other examples of portals to/repositories of open access texts. I’m hoping that this discussion can push beyond even traditional academic journal sites. What might these spaces offer us as teachers, librarians, students, practitioners of DH, etc. as sites of resistance to the ever-escalating commodification of knowledge?

Then again, how do we examine the structure of a site like DOAJ carefully and critically, as a text itself? There is an easy tendency to impart a heroic narrative to this movement (to which I certainly have felt prone), but if we were to look for its limits and omissions, what might we find? How can our discussions of open access engage more closely with materiality of technology, education, austerity? If we were to start to historicize the open access movement, what would inform the stories we tell ourselves and others? Engagement with queer, postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist theorizing around knowledge is especially exciting to me as I approach these questions, and imagine different futures for OA.

The 2008 CLIR report on Digital Humanities Centers suggested that Centers were risking silo-style knowledge and infrastructure development (www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub143/pub143.pdf). At the same time, major private and public funding agencies have begun to target regional collaboration, both amongst LACs and between LACs and other kinds of institutions. Additionally, the recent DH Commons project has begun to facilitate collaborative relationships amongst individual scholars.

I’d like to have a conversation about what kinds of collaborations are both possible and desirable for LAC faculty, whether in the context of a center or otherwise. Rather than thinking in terms of “what can X offer Y,” I’d propose thinking about identifying research/teaching/tech synergies and building collaborations in this manner. In addition to thinking about how to find like-minded scholars, we might also discuss the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of collaborative projects.