Michele, On 9/10/06, Michele White <mwhite@michelewhite.org> wrote:

Do you think that this proposed NSF requirement would change publication practices and academic expectations in humanities engagements with Internet studies and in places outside the United States?

Maybe. I think the trick right now is that faculty most likely to recognize the importance of open access are also most likely to be untenured. Promotion and tenure boards in some places still discount publications they think of as being in "online" journals. The real problem is that, with some notable exceptions, high-reputation journals are published by for-profit academic publishers. I think that while most of those on this list (though that certainly isn't representative of all who are engaging in internet studies in various ways) are not funded through NSF, having a sizable contingent of well-known academics encouraged to publish in open access journals would provide us with a larger set of high-prestige open access journals. It's a tipping point question. You only need a few well-known people publishing in a few open access journals to raise awareness of its importance. I suggest the NSF solution not because I think that US researchers or NSF funded researchers represent the best researchers, necessarily, but that it would be a clump of people that could be moved over to open access in one stroke. I was aware of NIH's movement in this direction (and an NSF-funded study for an OECD group recommended the same for NSF a few years back), but I was not aware of the uneven results. That certainly calls into question my assertion that it would have an immediate impact, but I still think it would be a worthwhile way of highlighting the importance. Alex -- // // This email is // [X] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais // Social Architect // http://alex.halavais.net //