Bret Devereaux

The books needed for research are often very expensive, meaning that you really need the support of a university library which can buy these things. Research trips to archives or museums to examine primary source material directly are expensive and need to be funded. 3/20

And of course you need time to do all of this. A system in which, apart from an elect tenured few, most historians are doing the work of history as second jobs is one in which only the leisured class does history - because only they will be able to afford to. 4/20

And to be clear, the kind of historical work that really moves the field forward is generally the short which requires years of research to produce narrow, technical books only other historians read. 5/20

I suppose I must seem to be the exception - I've managed to crowdfund my research. Except I haven't really - I've created a public engagement history/classics presence which throws off enough money for my research. That's a meaningful difference, I think. 7/20

While my patrons know they are helping me to do my research work and get monthly updates on my work, the nature of academic publishing means I can only rarely share the final products of that research with them directly, b/c I don't hold the copyright unencumbered. 8/20

And the response I frequently get is "why not publish open-access?" but the answer goes back to incentives: because I'm on the job market every year, instead of being in a permanent position, I have to aim my activity towards 'prestige'... 9/20

...because that is the kind of thing that hiring committees value (even if it is no guarentee of actually getting a job) and I can't afford to deviate from that because - again - I must face them every year. Academic freedom doesn't exist in the precariate. 10/20