Research Article
Facilitating Global Art Conversations: Availability of
Art Scholarship in Latin America
Alexander C. Watkins
Assistant Professor
University Libraries
University of Colorado
Boulder
Boulder, Colorado, United
States of America
Email: alexander.watkins@colorado.edu
Received: 2 Aug. 2016 Accepted: 13
Nov. 2016
2016 Watkins. This is an Open Access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
Abstract
Objective
– As
art history becomes an increasingly global discipline, the question of
geographically equitable access to the scholarly knowledge produced at
universities in Europe and North America remains unexamined. This study aims to
begin to answer that question by investigating the availability of art
scholarship in Latin America.
Methods
– Sixty
university libraries in Latin America were checked for various kinds of access
to two major art history journals.
Results
– The
study found that access rates were low, and that the types of access available
were suboptimal.
Conclusion
– The
results suggest that the current level of access is insufficient to support
global scholarly conversations in art history and that current modes of
dissemination of scholarship are not reaching key audiences.
Introduction
The study of Latin
American art is a major endeavour at universities in Europe and North America, but how
much of the knowledge produced at these universities is available to Latin
American scholars? This study aims to answer the question of whether Latin
American scholars have access to the art scholarship of Europe and the United
States. It specifically focuses on scholars at Latin American research
universities working towards open scholarship. Recently, local art histories
have flourished as the discipline expands from its origins in Western Europe to
become a global enterprise, but even with this global expansion of study we
have not necessarily seen a concomitant expansion of scholarly communication.
The question of access is a key part of facilitating a global scholarly
conversation, as access to the theories and analyses that are current in the
scholarly literature of the global centre are required for international
communities to engage with these ideas and communicate their own perspectives
back to the centre.
A Note on Terminology
There are a multitude
of terms to describe the unequal global distribution of wealth caused by the
legacy of colonialism. In this paper, I use the centre-periphery terminology
and model as adapted to the world of scholarly publishing by Suresh Canagarajah
(2002). The global centre consists primarily of the United States and Western
Europe; however, there are many centres within countries that are part of the
global periphery, which also take advantage of colonial mechanisms to
concentrate wealth. There are also peripheries within centre nations, excluded
from the prosperity that is concentrated in certain areas of that nation. The
term centre scholarship in this paper includes scholarship produced by
academics at institutions with significant social and financial capital concentrated
but not exclusively found in North America and Western Europe. This unequal
distribution of resources and reputation has a particular impact on access to
the scholarly literature of the centre in the periphery, as this literature is
made available most commonly on a toll access basis.
Literature Review
The traditional
publishing model in which scholars give their articles to publishers, and those
publishers sell the articles back to scholars and their universities is one
that has hampered access to knowledge around the world. The rapid rate of
increase in journal prices means that scholars must be associated with
well-funded universities to access the full breadth of the scholarly
literature, and this tends to disproportionately affect the access of periphery
scholars. As early as 1995, this issue was discussed in Scientific American, which recounts journal cancellations in
libraries across the developing world. Although Latin America was found to have
the most access to major journals of the three regions surveyed, libraries in
Africa, India, and Latin America were all found to be lacking access to
necessary serials collections (Gibbs, 1995a). Sri Lankan scholar Suresh
Canagarajah vividly recounts his experiences trying to get access to scholarly
literature, when at his university it was unthinkable to get the latest
scholarly journal or book. He speaks directly to the fact that his work and
that of his peers was hampered without this access (Canagarajah, 2002).
Consequently, many periphery scholars must employ slow, expensive, or
convoluted work-arounds to deal with a lack of access, such as emailing article
authors or traveling specifically to visit centre libraries (Bonaccorso et al.,
2014). The purchasing power of developing world libraries is further taxed by
the extreme prices charged by academic publishers (Arunachalam, 2003; Davison,
Harris, Licker, & Shoib, 2005). Specifically in Latin America, limited
financing means that university libraries often have incomplete collections
with little ability to plan for the long term (Holdom, 2005; Terra Figari,
2007). However, at the date of writing there has been little to no research on
holdings of specific journals by periphery libraries, especially in humanities
disciplines. This has made it hard to quantify the extent of this lack of
access to journals. The problematic repercussions of this lack of access is
often framed as one of distributive justice, where academic paywalls have
recreated patterns of social exclusion and the dominance of the centre over the
periphery (Alperín, Fischman, & Willinsky, 2008; Gómez & Bongiovani,
2012).
Insufficient access to
scholarly publications creates a barrier to periphery scholars publishing in
centre academic journals. Keeping up with the frontier of knowledge development
in the scholarly literature of the centre is impossible without access to current
journals and databases (Teferra, 2004). This lack of access creates a tendency
to emphasize foundational works and to omit the latest developments of the
centre (Terra Figari, 2007). This puts periphery scholars at a distinct
disadvantage when publishing in journals of the centre, as the peer-review
process requires writers to reference the most current centre scholarship
(Gibbs, 1995b; Willinsky, 2006). Without access to the current literature of
the centre, periphery scholars are left out of the scholarly conversation and
excluded from full participation in the process of knowledge creation
(Canagarajah, 2002; Holdom, 2005). This creates a situation in which developing
countries have the art, but in a striking parallel to colonial exploitation of
raw materials, it has to be analyzed in the centre to be turned into scholarly
knowledge accepted by the centre (Canagarajah, 2002).
Latin America is in
many ways at the forefront of creating open scholarly knowledge. For example,
Open Access (OA) publishing has been readily adopted in Latin America. Indeed,
the OA model is much more prevalent in Latin American than in most other
regions; a full 51% of online journals in Latin America are open access
(Alperín et al., 2011, 2008). Growing internet connectivity and the historical
lack of visibility of Latin American print journals has meant that OA
e-publishing gives scholars in Latin America new opportunities to disseminate
their research (Holdom, 2005). Several factors have enabled the wide adoption
of OA in Latin America including the lack of an entrenched scholarly publishing
industry and first-hand experience by Latin American scholars with the
consequences of limited access (Alperín et al., 2008). Not only are e-journals
flourishing, but open access repositories, databases where copies of articles
are archived and made freely available, have allowed scholars to make their
work openly available even when they publish in toll access journals (Alperín
et al., 2008; Johnston, 2010).
Aims
The study’s goal was
to determine the availability of centre art journals at Latin American
universities that are practicing open scholarship. The literature review
revealed that Latin American scholars are making their work openly accessible
to global scholars, but do scholars at these universities have access to the
core journals of centre art scholarship?
Methods
The first step was
identifying Latin American universities that are practicing open scholarship.
This study used the OpenDOAR Database to select institutions. OpenDOAR lists
universities with institutional repositories by country. These institutions
have created and support databases where their affiliates can deposit their
scholarly products and have them made openly available, demonstrating
participation in the open access movement. Additionally, the resources and
staff necessary to operate a repository suggest a certain minimum level of
funding. Universities with a singular focus like engineering or medicine were
eliminated as out of scope. Due to language limitations only institutions in
Spanish speaking countries were selected. After excluding institutions that did
not meet the criteria, there were a total of 78 institutions; however, for 18
of these, reliable subscription information could not be located, so the final
sample was 60 university libraries.
The study investigated
access to two art history journals: the
Burlington Magazine and the Art
Bulletin. These two journals were selected because they are core journals
for art history. The Burlington Magazine
is the longest continually published art periodical in English. Published in
the United Kingdom, it set the standard for scholarly art history publications,
cementing its reputation with a string of well-respected editors (Fawcett & Phillpot, 1976). Beginning
publication not long after, the Art
Bulletin rose in prominence to become arguably the most influential art
journal (Fawcett & Phillpot, 1976).
It is published in the United States of America by the College Art Association.
Neither journal focuses exclusively on Latin America; instead the articles,
editorials, letters, and reviews in these journals are key sites of the
scholarly back-and-forth that generates new scholarly knowledge in the centre.
Because the goal was to determine Latin American scholars’ ability to
participate in the broader scholarly conversation going on in centre art
history, these journals were selected specifically because of their importance
to the discipline as a whole, rather than because of a focus on Latin American
art. Selecting journals that solely study Latin American art would have risked
pigeonholing Latin American scholars and suggesting that they are only able to
work on local topics, while centre scholars enjoy the whole purview of global
art to study.
The sixty university
library websites and catalogs were investigated for access to each journal.
Each of the various ways that universities had access to the journal was
recorded. As an additional check to catalog and website searching, an e-mail in
English and Spanish was sent to these sixty libraries, in order to confirm that
availability had not been missed. The responses that were received were then
checked against the information gathered from the websites. We found that the
emails verified the information found on websites and catalogs.
This study has several
limitations. Firstly, it includes only two art history journals and relatively
expensive ones at that. However, these journals represent major loci of
scholarly conversations in art history. Scholars attempting to write art
history that is publishable in centre journals would find themselves
confronting a nearly unbridgeable lacuna in their research without access to
articles from these journals. While this is a limitation, the selected journals
are used as indicators of problematic access to centre art history scholarship
as a whole. Additionally, the study only examines Latin American universities
with institutional repositories. Therefore, it does not necessarily reflect the
situation at all Latin American universities, only those with repositories.
However, if institutions with repositories are outliers, the funding commitment
and know-how that a repository represents suggests that their libraries may be
more well-funded than the average. As the study only looks at these major
universities, it consequently left out smaller, perhaps more art-focused
institutions such as museum libraries. While access at specialty libraries is
certainly an interesting question, a major concern of this study was the ease
and convenience of reading these journals at research universities, where the
majority of scholars are concentrated. While scholars may be willing to make
extraordinary efforts to track down a single key article, these hurdles waste
scholars’ time, and preclude them from keeping up with general trends and
emerging ideas, which are made possible by easy access through one’s
institution.
Results
The results show that
most Latin American scholars at institutions with repositories lack access to
these two major journals of art history. A large percentage of institutions had
no access to either publication. Where there was access it was generally
suboptimal, often only available after an embargo or at the mercy of a
commercial vendor which could drop coverage at any time.
The study found
several ways that libraries provide access to these two journals. They may
subscribe directly to print or electronic editions. Older issues of both
journals are available through a subscription to JSTOR, though not current
issues, as there is an embargo of five years for the Burlington Magazine and the Art
Bulletin in JSTOR. Libraries that subscribe to some EBSCO or ProQuest
full-text packages such as Academic Search Premiere can also get access to the Art Bulletin. However, this access is
unstable, as these content aggregators can drop the full-text access at any
time. Additionally, the extent of back issue access varies among packages, and
none provide full access to the entire back file. There were five kinds of
access for each journal possible at each institution.
- Subscription: A direct subscription to the print
or electronic version of the journal. Considered full access.
- JSTOR: Access through JSTOR to back issues, but
lacking the five most recent years due to the embargo.
- Aggregator: Access via ProQuest and EBSCO to
current issues and varying amounts of back file, but this access is
unstable and unreliable.
- JSTOR and Aggregator: Access to current issues
via an aggregator as well as reliable access to back issues through JSTOR.
Considered full access.
- No Access.
Figure 1
The Burlington Magazine is unavailable at
most Latin American universities.
Figure 2
The Art Bulletin is more accessible, but
much of the access is unreliable.
As shown in figure 1,
only a single institution had access to recent issues of the Burlington Magazine. In a full 72% of
institutions, the Burlington Magazine
was not available at all. Another 27% had access through JSTOR to articles, but
only with a five year embargo.
As shown in figure 2, Art Bulletin was unavailable at 42% of
the institutions, while 58% had access of some kind to recent issues. The
journal’s relative availability is due to its inclusion in the typical package
of full-text journals subscribed to through content aggregators such as EBSCO
and ProQuest. Indeed, only two institutions (3%) had direct subscriptions to
the Art Bulletin. This means that 55%
of institutions had access to recent issues of the Art Bulletin entirely through aggregators. Problematically,
however, access through content aggregators is not stable. EBSCO or ProQuest
could cut Art Bulletin from their
packages or the Art Bulletin could
decide to withdraw, and these institutions would be left with no access to the
journal, not even to back issues. Additionally, for those institutions with
only aggregator subscriptions, there is a lack of access to a substantial
amount of the back file. Some institutions also had subscriptions to JSTOR
(27%) that gives them stable access to back issues. When combined with their
aggregator subscriptions, these institutions, along with those with direct
subscriptions, were considered to have full access to the Art Bulletin. Overall, 30% of institutions had full access to the
Art Bulletin either through subscription or a combination of JSTOR and aggregator
access.
Figure 3 shows a
cross-sample of both journals, in which 42% of institutions had no access to either
journal. A combined 30% had some access to one journal (always the Art Bulletin), either full access (3%)
or unstable access (27%), while having no access to the Burlington Magazine. Only a combined 28% of institutions had some
access to both journals. In this small group that had access to both journals,
only one institution had full access to both journals without an embargo, while
the rest had full access to the Art
Bulletin but only had access to the Burlington
Magazine after a five-year embargo.
Figure 3
The combined picture
of the two journals shows that many institutions lack access to either journal,
while very few institutions have access to both.
Discussion
The results show a
concerning lack of access to these centre-published art history journals at
Latin American universities with institutional repositories. This study found
that even when access does exist it is often delayed by five years. The results
suggest that Latin American scholars at these institutions will have difficulty
reading art history articles published in centre journals in a timely way. As
the literature has shown, limited access to centre journals hinders periphery
scholars’ ability to publish in these same journals because of the difficulty
of staying up-to-date on the most recent centre theory (Gibbs, 1995b;
Willinsky, 2006). Therefore, lack of access limits periphery scholars’ ability
to fully participate in centre discourse. They will be challenged to
communicate their theories, ideas, and interpretations to centre scholars, and
they will have difficulty debating the work of centre scholars, even when that
scholarship is on the art of Latin America. Lack of access thus helps to
perpetuate a colonial system of art history knowledge creation in which new
knowledge is created and given authority by those in the centre, and where the
art and ideas of Latin America only enters the scholarly discourse after being
analyzed by centre scholars.
Due to barriers to
participation in centre scholarship, the ideas and theories of these periphery
scholars are likely to be published in local journals. These publications have
a high chance of remaining unseen by centre scholars. Previous studies have
shown that much of the art history published in Latin America, though often
made available through open access, is difficult to find through conventional
research methods (Alperín et al., 2011; Evans, Thompson, & Watkins,
2011; Holdom, 2005). As a result of
inadequate information access, there is breakdown in global scholarly
communication, where art history ideas are not being transmitted between centre
and periphery. The theory and analyses created in both the periphery and the
centre remain in separate spheres, rather than becoming engaged in meaningful
dialogue and productively building on one another. Thus the scholarly
conversation in art history is impoverished, losing key voices while privileging
those scholars with greater information resources.
Solving the access
problem for these Latin American universities will require a change in
traditional systems of knowledge distribution in the discipline. Simply having
Latin American institutions increase their journal subscriptions is not a
viable solution. When many libraries are cancelling subscriptions, and the
rising cost of existing subscriptions exceeds inflation, this is simply
untenable (Hoskins & Stilwell, 2011; Spencer
& Millson-Martula, 2006). Centre scholars should question whether
only publishing in a scholarly journal, even (and perhaps particularly) top
tier toll-access journals, adequately disseminates their work to the global
scholarly community. Open access publishing is a well-established alternative
model in which access is free for the reader. Open access has already been
adopted by many Latin American scholars: all the institutions in this study
already have institutional repositories, and open access journals are far more
popular in Latin America than in the United States. If centre scholars were to
increase their adoption of open access practices, their scholarship would
become far more accessible and easily available to Latin American scholars.
Importantly this would start to alleviate access problems in Latin America and
facilitate global conversations.
Conclusion
Access to scholarship
is often overlooked in calls for a more global art history. But far from being
a secondary concern, it is a key requirement for scholarly conversations that
truly integrate global perspectives and move away from an inherently limited
centre-out model of scholarship. More openly available scholarship is necessary
if global voices are to participate in centre art history, and if centre and periphery
discourses are to be joined into a single, richer discussion. It seems that
traditional models for access to and dissemination of scholarship are not up to
this task. The evidence of substandard access to centre art history scholarship
suggests there is further work to be done investigating access to information
in the periphery, as well as the effect of this limited access on the work of
scholars in a range of other disciplines. It is this author’s sincere hope that
this work will catalyze and build towards sustainable solutions, as well as
motivate individual scholars to help create a more global discourse by moving
toward open access scholarship.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to
thank his research assistant, Amanda Saracho, whose language skills and time spent
combing library websites were key to the writing of this article.
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