Hi All, I've been reading this discussion with interest as it is a topic about which I am passionate. And because I am avoiding a pile of final exams. I've been involved with Bad Subjects (we were "open access" before "open access" http://bad.eserver.org) since 1994 and recently had a nasty runin with Sage after publishing a piece in New Media and Society (you can read about it at http://superbon.net/?p=461). There are a few issues to disentangle here, I think. 1. The "actual" quality of a journal is not the same thing as its prestige/standing in a field. The latter matters for people's tenure dossiers at many (though not all) institutions; the former matters for all of us when we are actually doing out work. The two may or may not be related. 2. Journals require labor. Not just the reviewing and writing kind, but also the publishing kind, which is the traditional function of publishers. If you remove the publisher, you need some kind of funding stream to pay for the additional resources and labor that a journal uses. Or you need people who are willing to work for free. This is one of the greatest obstacles to the open-access movement and will doom those many new online journals. People think that the main costs are eliminated when you eliminate paper. But almost all those print journals come with some paid staff (often graduate students) who manage the submission and review process. Others are paid for formatting, proofreading and keeping the journal looking good. Those functions are still important. 3. In theory, professors aren't working for free. We draw salaries to do a combination of research, teaching and service. When we write for journals or review for them, we are working on salary. However, one trick of the neoliberal university is to redefine the job: reduce the number of administrative staff in departments or reduce the number of departments and increase their size; move funding obligations to individual faculty who must apply for grants to support their students and sometimes even to support their office supply budgets; increase class size and reduce the number of TAs; and on and on. Eliminating paid positions for journals, while linked to the increased "freeness" of open access, is also linked to the increasing time crunch in the professor job. (This also trickles down to students, who are expected to publish and travel much more, which cuts into the one activity that is most important in graduate education prior to the dissertation: reading). I feel very Capital I, Part I: it's about surplus labor. 4. That said, open access is generally a good thing if your goal is to disseminate what you write. When the Canadian Journal of Communication went open access (it survives through dues and -- I think -- also through grants) their readership shot up. http://www.cjc-online.ca/ The new International Journal of Communication (http://ijoc.org) also has funding behind it, and they've managed to attract some big names in the field, which should probably offset the online prestige issue, at least over time. 5. But dissemination is only one goal. Many journal publishers, like Sage, are more interested in protecting their profits than facilitating the circulation of scholars' ideas. And like it or not, many junior faculty at least feel they have to be concerned about where they publish and not just how many people read or use their material. Which is why we can't just junk the current journal system without also reworking the tenure system. 6. For what it's worth, anything long, I prefer to read on paper. So the answer, to me, is some kind of incrementalism, with a simple, final goal: open access journals with both online and print components that are funded well enough not to extract additional free labor from students and faculty, and which are useful to people -- like assistant professors -- who will still need to partake of the academic prestige economy for the forseeable future. Best, --J, and now back to grading