So often the will to openness is directed toward the finished products of scholarship and not to the raw materials that make such research possible.

Beyond scholarly communication there are two less overt resources resources that make scholarship possible, and which for the most part remain closed to those who do not belong to elite research organizations (e.g. universities): (1) direct access to experts in the field, and (2) access to raw data and primary sources. The former may perhaps be opened by new forms of collaboration mediated by social software; the latter, however, have remained jealously guarded by the scholars who acquired them, or whose institutions own them. Archaeologists and art historians are familiar with this situation — real research requires keys to collections, keys which are not given to just anyone. These resources are the “Intel inside” for humanistic research, the capital that drives the production of scholarly communication.

Perhaps the Archimedes Palimpsest project will show the way to a different model for providing access to the scholarly capital. And hopefully projects such as Freebase and dbPedia will have other, richer, deeper resources to work with besides Wikipedia.