My vision is the availability of all academic knowledge on the Internet for free, no author-charges and no reader-charges. This is the idea of a global Internet "brain" of academic knowledge. Knowledge as such is historic, dynamic, co-operatively produced, applying a Hegelian dialectical logic this means that openness and free availability is the Essence and Truth of academic knowledge. Corporate publishing negates and hinders and alienates the freedom of academic knowledge. But most academic knowledge today exists as private property owned by publishing houses and sold as commodities. Corporate publishing is a hindrance to the vision of free academic knowledge. Paper authors produce surplus value and hundreds and thousands of hours of unpaid labour time (Tiziana Terranova speaks of "free labour") that is exploited by publishing houses, and sold as commodities back to the scientific community in order to transform the surplus value into profit. Capital here functions as a medium of an academic communication process that could in principle be organized without corporate mediation. Is open access-publishing a good alternative? In its current form, not really, because many open access journals charge authors. So e.g. there has been a recent offensive in open access journals by Bentham, they charge authors up to 800US$ per paper! This is the model of corporate open access journals (coaj). Coaj could result in economic pressures being put by publishers on editors, which could result in a lack of quality because journals are driven by economic interests to accept many papers, because in the coaj-model more papers means more profit (this is not necessarily the case in traditional corporate academic publishing). Neither the private property- nor the coaj model are truthful. The alternative in order to try to realize a vision of free access are non-profit open access journals (npoaj). There are already many such journals around, see http://www.doaj.org But in this context, a large problem is that careers and reputation depend in many disciplines on getting your papers published in journals that are included in the Science Citation Indexes. Currently only about 1% of the journals covered by the ISI Web of Knowledge are open access: see http://scientific.thomson.com/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations... . ISI Thomson is a private profit-oriented corporation, hence its business and its inclusion/selection practices tend to reflect the dominant interests of the publishing industry, which has an interest in marginalizing and keeping the visibility of non-profit alternatives low. ISI Thomson argues that articles from open access journals are less frequently cited in other journals, and hence are less included: http://scientific.thomson.com/media/presentrep/acropdf/impact-oa-journals.pd... . But if you marginalize certain journals due to corporate interests, then of course they will be less cited because they have unequal chances of being visible. I don't share at all the argument made by Ingbert Floyd that journals are commodities and hence business models for open access have to be created. This is a typical Thatcherite affirmative TINA (there is no alternative) argument. The alternative is to create and support the alternatives! So I think, danah, that not all open-access journals are real alternatives, but only a certain portion of it, non-profit open access journals. Hence my suggestions concerning what to do are: * Scholars could increasingly submit their articles to non-profit open access journals (npoaj): see http://www.doaj.org and could support such journals by joining their edititorial boards, making reviews, recommending these journals to others, etc... * For most, it won't be possible to stop publishing in corporate journals because these are unfortunately still the journals that control the academic world and will help you advance your career. Hence the suggestion is to submit a certain share of ones papers to npoaj, as much as one considers reasonable. For people with tenure, this is an easy choice. * In order to increase reputation, scholars could read and cite more articles from npoaj in their papers. * Selected npoaj could be suggested in systematic organized massive waves for inclusion in SCI, SSCI, etc to Thomson (also to Scopus etc): http://scientific.thomson.com/forms/isi/journalrec/ http://scientific.thomson.com/forms/isi/journalsubmission/ Academic publishing is a capitalist political economy, its economic interests alienate general academic interests and knowledge, it colonizes science with the logic of money capital. The alternative is non-corporate publishing and the creation of a non-corporate world. Christian -- _____________________________ Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet and Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Fax +43 662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Co-Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access online journal for the foundations of information science: http://triplec.uti.at New Book: Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. 408 Pages. http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn... "It is the duty of the press to come forward on behalf of the oppressed in its immediate neighbourhood" (Karl Marx) "two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced (...) society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society" (Herbert Marcuse).