There have been a bunch of recent posts on open access in anthropology. Here I want to point to John Hawks's entry, "Why don't universities cut out the middleman?" The middleman in question is the group of commercial journal publishers. Right now, I work for Elsevier, Sage, Blackwell, and other commercial presses for free. I put in unpaid time doing scholarly work so that these large corporations can make profits from my efforts. Sometimes I feel like a fool; why should I divert my time and efforts from my own research in order to enrich these companies? The answer, of course, is that this unpaid labor consists of reviewing manuscripts (peer review), and I consider such reviewing a fundamental professional duty. So I do this work willingly, but every once in a while I get steamed up about it.
John Hawks asks what would happen if the whole system of funding scholarly journals were transformed such that journals were all online and open access (gold OA), sponsored by universities. University libraries would pay for editing and page production of these journals instead of paying for costly subscriptions to commercial print (and electronic) journals. Ignoring for now the complexities and difficulties in such a transformation. If this change were to come about, then my unpaid labor writing reviews (and writing articles, for that matter) would benefit my university, not a commercial press. I would feel much better about that. Hawks has a variety of interesting comments; take a look.
Savage Minds also has had some interesting recent posts on open access and the AAA; with some good discussion in the comments:
- AAA director condemns really stupid business models (Sept 1)
- Gourmet vs. All Things Considered: The Anthropological Edition (Sept. 2)
Now I half expect Steven Harnad to come swooping down and point out that the kind of massive transition Hawks discusses is really pie in the sky - its not going to happen soon, if it happens at all. But in the meantime, we can all promote open access and all of its benefits if we self-archive our publications. Harnad is completely correct here, and well worth listening to.
2 comments:
Speculation Versus Problem Solving
Couldn't do a hawk-swoop on Hawkes because his site does not allow comments -- but you took the words out of my beak!
When will we stop making these sky-pie "modest proposals," ignoring and diverting attention and action from the real, practical solution, which is fully within our reach?
It is a real historic puzzle why we prefer to keep speculating fancifully, continuously reinventing wheels that do not work (and that have been proposed and rebutted over and over again) without grasping the low-hanging fruit:
All universities and research funders can and should mandate that the final, refereed draft of all journal articles must be self-archived in the author's institutional repository (or OpenDepot, if no institution or repository) immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Over 160 universities and funders have mandated self-archiving already. Most universities already have (near-empty) repositories. It costs nothing to mandate self-archiving. And mandates really work.
Why on earth do we prefer to continue theorizing about "cutting out the middleman" while research access, impact and progress continue to be lost, needlessly, year after year after year?
Comment from Stevan Harnad (somehow this comment disappeared):
Speculation Versus Problem Solving
Couldn't do a hawk-swoop on Hawkes because his site does not allow comments -- but you took the words out of my beak!
When will we stop making these sky-pie "modest proposals," ignoring and diverting attention and action from the real, practical solution, which is fully within our reach?
It is a real historic puzzle why we prefer to keep speculating fancifully, continuously reinventing wheels that do not work (and that have been proposed and rebutted over and over again) without grasping the low-hanging fruit:
All universities and research funders can and should mandate that the final, refereed draft of all journal articles must be self-archived in the author's institutional repository (or OpenDepot, if no institution or repository) immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Over 160 universities and funders have mandated self-archiving already. Most universities already have (near-empty) repositories. It costs nothing to mandate self-archiving. And mandates really work.
Why on earth do we prefer to continue theorizing about "cutting out the middleman" while research access, impact and progress continue to be lost, needlessly, year after year after year?
Posted by Stevan Harnad to Publishing Archaeology at September 6, 2010 8:55 PM
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