In general, I completely agree with danah boyd on this one, but convincing scholars to adopt open access models is but one of the challenges in moving to an open-access model of publishing. Thus, I thought I'd bring up some of the complications, given that I'm from library and information science. If we, as academics who care, are going to solve this, I think it would be productive to consider the barriers that currently exist. I wish I could write more, but I have some deadlines I need to meet today. 1) Journals are as much a service as a product. Thus, publishers advertise, distribute, index, abstract, pay for the costs of reviewing, etc. I'm not from the publishing world, but I've seen some statistics on the costs. How will these costs be paid for? (I know Carole Palmer http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~clpalmer/ has done some research on this, but I can't quickly find a representative publication.) 2) One of the biggest problems facing the open access movement is finding economic models which work. After a bit of web research, my impression is that all open-access publishers which are free for both authors and readers, are supported by foundations, or in rare cases, by universities. Thus, their economic models are *not* self-sustaining. If everybody who wants to start a journal needs to depend on a foundation to get started, it will be very difficult to start a journal, as competition for foundation funding will be very tight (and likely biased in the same direction that grant money is currently biased). Furthermore, there are individuals who are wary of this model, because they do not want foundations to be the gatekeepers of academic research. They feel that academics should be the gatekeepers of academic research, like they are now. The one good thing is that under the reader-pays models, a group of scientists can start their own journal, even their own publishing company, and thus short-circuit any price, content, or other controls that they are being subject to by their current publisher. There are in fact examples of this in the academic publishing world. 3) Remember that a common alternative to the reader-pays model, is the author pays model. This is a very common "open access" model. But do we really want to force researchers to have grants, so that they can afford to pay for their articles to be published? There have been several attempts at creating fully automatic journals, where, theoretically, the only costs would be to pay for the bandwidth, the hosting, and some maintenance of the code. But these have all failed. Why? I don't know. Issues of indexing and browsing might be relevant. 4) There is a *huge* difference between for-profit and non-profit publishers. Research indicates that the costs of journal publishing are about the same, but the access fees for-profit publishers charge are often many times more expensive than the fees of non-profits. (Check out Cristina Lopez's link for some stats on journal costs: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.htm ) 5) The Institutional Repositories movement is in no small measure an attempt by libraries to reduce journal costs, by providing faculty with an alternative means of publication. The problem, is that no faculty member makes the time to submit their publications, so the adoption rates of the repositories are dismal, thus limiting the funds libraries can secure for their operation. People who are leading the movement, are trying to figure out ways of providing alternative publication venues. But, of course, that means that such venues are often limited to members of the university, due to university policy. Academics who do not work in universities, or academics from poor universities are at a disadvantage if this model is the major publishing model. 6) People these days often hype the digital born journal, as addressing some of these concerns. The truth is, that the fixed costs of digital journals and print journals are about the same. And, if things are digital born-and-bred, what are the preservation mechanisms in place to make sure these articles exist 10-100 years from now? Currently, libraries, not publishers, take on this role by physically storing and maintaining print runs of journals. But if print runs disappear, what then? Libraries often *cannot* store digital versions (publisher rules, formats that are not preservation-friendly, etc.), unless they have control over the format of the document--another reason for the Institutional Repository movement. And publishers don't seem to be actively (or at least intentionally) taking on this role. So, any ideas for addressing these problems? In particular, I would love to see a self-sustainable economic model, that is not directly subject to foundation whims or University budget cuts. Until solutions to this and other problems are found, however, I like the ACM model, where access to the ACM digital library is pay-only, and thus libraries, companies, and some individuals subscribe (and keep it alive), but all authors are free to publish their own work either on their website, or on an institutional website (such as an Institutional Repository), as long as they establish clearly that the article was originally published in the ACM. Thus, if you, the author, is motivated, you can make your work free to access by everybody, drop it in an institutional repository so that it gets preserved even if you can't preserve it yourself. And doing so boosts citation rates too! This solution is not systematic enough for preserving our academic heritage over the long-term, but it is a start. Ingbert On Feb 7, 2008 9:15 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc@rpi.edu> wrote:
Yes, replying to my own post, but I should have checked my RSS feed this morning:
http://savageminds.org/2008/02/07/anthropology-news-special-safety-valve-edi... http://dev.aaanet.org/publications/articles.cfm
Best. Casey
On Feb 7, 2008 10:13 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc@rpi.edu> wrote:
There has been a fair amount of talk related to this by anthropologists. I think your article also falls into what Chris Kelty wrote about as "Recursive Public Irony," about access to articles about access can be quite limited:
http://savageminds.org/2005/05/24/recursive-public-irony/ http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/?p=43
-- Casey O'Donnell RPI STS Department - PhD Candidate
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-- ========================================== Ingbert Floyd PhD Student Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign http://ingbert.org/ || skype: spacesoon Check out the unofficial GSLIS Wiki: http://www.gslis.org/ "Dream in a pragmatic way." -Aldous Huxley