Hello colleagues, This is a very interesting discussion about academic publishing. Thanks to Charles for having inflamed it. I think there is a contradiction between democratic access to academic knowledge and the stratified character of the academic system with two colliding poles. 1) The empire of capitalist academia: The academic publishing market is highly concentrated, the book and journal market is controlled by a few companies. These companies have huge personnel and monetary resources and acceptance in the academic community. Therefore they act as gatekeepers of academic reputation. It is telling that an academic reputation generation mechanism like Social Sciences Citation Index is itself owned by a capitalist company. What is the share of open access journals in SSCI? Very low. What is the number of citations of open access journals in comparison to corporate journals? Etc. The ranking, classification, assessment, impact factor-culture of the academia is an expression of the instrumental logic of accumulation, so acaademia itself is a capitalist system in a specific sense as being a system of accumulation. Academia is dominated by technological rationality - no surprise in a capitalist society. The generation of academic capital is largely shaped by capitalist publishing houses that control mechanisms for generating academic capital. And if one wants to work as an academic, then it is very difficult or maybe even impossible to avoid being complicit in the capitalism of academia because you are forced to attain tenure, gain reputation, etc if you want to survive and live as an academic. 2) The multitude of academic knowledge commons: The reaction to these stratified structures is dissatisfaction of scholars, the insight that the capitalist academic empire creates inequality (for scholars in developing countries, in countries where neoliberalism strikes universities, libraries and employmnet conditions of academics especially hard, etc) and as a result: the demand for academic knowledge commons and a democratic academia. This demand is channeled into academic open access/content projects (journals, publishing houses, etc). But one should not be idealistic: open access within a capitalist economy is difficult to organize, free within capitalism always ends up as serving capitalist interests. Academic publishing work needs to be organized, and in capitalism this is most efficiently be done in the form of the exploitation of wage labour. Keeping open access democratic and free requires non-profit strategies. There simply is no academic knowledge to sell if you base a project on the insight that for democratic reasons knowledge should be freely accessible. So non-commodification must be the rule. But then it is difficult to organize the organizational work, it can mainly be done a) based on voluntary labour, b) based on donations. In any case, running a non-profit academic open-access publishing project is hard work (I know what I am talking about) and you are facing tough competition. Nonetheless, the vision of going beyond the empire of capitalist academia is important and something to struggle for. Non-profit open access publishing is academic class struggle. But there are unequal conditions for this struggle. One should not idealize open access: it can easily be transformed into a profitable business, see for example the accumulation strategy of Bentham, which created hundreds of open access journals that are based on very high author fees. Author fees create a new stratification mechanism, etc. => The contradiction between the empire of capitalist academia and the multitude of academic knowledge commons => 3) The contradiction between these two poles creates a dilemma for the single scholar: Supporting the publishing strategies of academic monopoly capital is at the same time the ideological reproduction of and complicity in maintaining the inequality of the empire of capitalist academia. Supporting only open access publishing strategies risks marginalization of reputation, cutting of department funding, lack of citations, etc and in the end unemployment. At the same time these projects are the only way to create cracks, fissures and holes in the empire and the chance to overcome it and to establish a democratic academy. This is a vicious cycle and difficult terrain to navigate. 4) The problem is that there is no easy solution, acting within systemic contradictions is What is the solution? To be aware of the the contradictions and to work within the sytem against the system in order to explode it. That's the political economy of academic publishing today. It's time to question capitalism and its effects on academia and our lives (and that is what is happening in Maddison, WI, Egypt, etc NOW). Best, Christian -- Prof. Christian Fuchs Chair in Media and Communication Studies Department of Informatics and Media Uppsala University Kyrkogårdsgatan 10 Box 513 751 20 Uppsala Sweden christian.fuchs@im.uu.se Tel +46 (0) 18 471 1019 http://fuchs.uti.at http://www.im.uu.se NetPolitics Blog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blog Editor of tripleC: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Book "Internet and Society" (Paperback, Routledge 2010) Am 3/9/11 10:46 PM, schrieb Alejandro Tortolini:
Think this a great discussion. This may be useful, about paper vs. ebook costs:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?_r=1
And about the future of public libraries: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/digital-underclass-what-happens-when-the-li...
Personally, I´m worried about the prohibitive prices of North America´s books, wich makes another cultural barrier for the spreading of knowledge. Best,
Alejandro Tortolini Scitech journalist - Teacher Buenos Aires - Argentina _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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