Samuel Huskey

November 3, 2023

Samuel Huskey (Ph.D., University of Iowa, ORCID: 0000-0002-8192-9385) is a professor in OU’s Department of Classics and Letters. His scholarly interests are Greek and Latin language and literature (especially bucolic poetry), textual criticism, and digital humanities. In addition to serving as the Information Architect for the Society for Classical Studies, he is Director of the Digital Latin Library, a project that focuses on publishing openly available, born-digital critical editions of Latin texts in human- and machine-readable form.   

 Why is open access important to you?

To answer that question, I’d like to reflect on the Latin motto of the University of Oklahoma: Civi et Reipublicae. Unlike the mottos of other institutions of research and higher learning that elevate abstract ideas like Veritas (“Truth”) or Lux (“Light”), OU’s motto states its purpose clearly and succinctly: “For Benefit of the Citizen and the State.” We should bear that in mind when making decisions about the dissemination of our research and scholarship. Who benefits from putting research outputs behind a paywall or printing them in books and journals that cost too much for most individuals to purchase? We owe it to our fellow citizens to share our findings as widely as possible, whether those findings concern potential cures for diseases or insights into the very things that make us human. Open access is key to realizing the ideal enshrined in OU’s motto.   

 You have led the development of the Digital Latin Library, a grant-funded project that seeks to facilitate the discoverability and readability of texts written in Latin. Could you talk about the project and its relationship to open scholarship?

From the first, open access informed the development of the Digital Latin Library, and it remains a guiding principle of the project to this day. The DLL has a two-fold mission:    1)To publish and curate critical editions of Latin texts, of all types, from all eras;    2)To facilitate the finding and, where openly available and accessible online, the reading of all texts written in Latin.   

With regard to the first part of the mission, we have developed a new approach to publishing critical editions of Latin texts. Traditionally (literally for centuries), scholars have worked with one or another of a handful of academic presses to publish critical editions. Those presses have handled the review, production, marketing, and distribution processes—all of which contribute to the high price of the finished, printed product. Our model makes use of developments in technology and scholarly communications to produce freely and openly available digital editions in the form of datasets that can be visualized in a variety of forms: as web pages, in visualization tools, and as print-on-demand books. Instead of publishers managing the peer-review process, the three learned societies associated with the DLL (the Society for Classical Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America) do it, the idea being that scholarly societies are in the best position to determine what is or is not up to the standards of scholarship. Instead of investing all of our effort into the costly endeavor of producing printed books, we focus on the creation and curation of editions as high-quality datasets that are openly available to anyone with a connection to the internet.   

As for the second part of the mission, the DLL is in the process of building a Linked Open Data catalog of all Latin texts available online. It is a slow process, since different projects use different approaches and formats for publishing Latin texts on the internet. Eventually, however, we aim to create an LOD resource that will allow anyone to find and read any Latin text from any era.   

For all of our projects, we have used open-source tools and standards, and we make our own software and tools available in open data repositories. We also make every effort to publish the results of our research and scholarship in open access outlets. In cases where that is not an option, we put pre-print copies in the SHAREOK repository.   

 Why did you agree to serve as a member of the OU Faculty Senate ad hoc Open Access Policy committee, and what do you see as the importance/value of the committee's work? 

 It would have been difficult to say no to working on a project that aligns so well with my own priorities for research and scholarship, and it was all the easier to say yes to working with such a great group of people. Karen Rupp Serano, Katherine Pandora, J. P. Masly, and Bin Wang were fantastic committee members, and Darren Purcell did a great job as our chair. And the support we received from experts in Open Access like OU’s own Melissa Seelye was remarkable. As for the importance and value of the committee’s work, not only did it align OU with the top research institutions in the world when it comes to promoting the open accessibility of new knowledge, it also reinforced our motto of being for the benefit of the citizens and the state of Oklahoma.