Kia ora koutou I think there are some interesting issues relevant to the Air-l community in Mike's story and Estzer's follow-up. 1) The effect of the increasingly onerous licensing demands of academic publishers as part of a general commodification of scholarly research. This is absolutely an ICT-driven phenomenon, with the expansion of Sage, T&F etc. mirroring the mergers, acquisitions and consolidation visible in other media industries and much of the Western economy generally. I donated the phrase "the Wal-marting of scholarly publishing" to a friend doing some interesting work on some of these issues: =>http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2002-December/002364.html 2) As online access becomes the norm, the marginal cost of journal production decreases rapidly, approaching zero. The publishers, then, no longer sell printed materials and distribution, but provide an "access service". However, the publisher's business model is not just about providing service. It also seeks to make money out of the academic work on some kind of for-use basis. The academic work will have some kind of future value but no-one knows exactly what it is (what the economist Richard Caves calls the *ars longa* property of creative goods). The incentive for the publisher is to secure the ability to extract rents from licensing the product in the future. The fecundity of online distribution means that scarcity must be created through legal apparatuses that prevent the copying and distribution of material. The negative implications of this for dissemination of knowledge in the traditional academic sense are obvious. The result is a professionalisation of access to the fruits of academic labour (which is nevertheless often given for free - Andrew Ross has written eloquently on this: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0006/msg00062.html). 3) [An interesting side effect of this dynamic in other industries is the development of relationships between production companies and distributors. I would predict the rise of the institutional publishing contract - e.g. Foo University signs over to Sage the rights to publication of all academics on its books, and this is part of your employment contract with Foo U..] 4) Initiatives such as Soros' openaccess are welcome in this environment. But by nature, the sort of scholar interested in these issues is likely to be untenured, overworked, underemployed, and part of a large and hungry academic labour pool. Not to say that there aren't more established academics interested and supporting these initiatives, but that generally it's those on the margins who are more conscious of these issues (and might be aware of parallels with e.g. open source initiatives in software production). So the professional scholar interested in disrupting the "closure mechanisms" associated with the professionalisation of academic knowledge is left with a dilemma. As Eszter notes, on the one hand you're concerned about your career seeing as every job you might get has 100 other PhDs applying for it, and you want to publish in the right places to establish your professional reputation. On the other, you might have both an ethical concern to publish where people can access your work, and an economic concern to maintain control over the future economic value of the products of your labour. 5) I don't think there are any easy answers to these issues, except that I would suggest that it is important for both publishers, academics and academic managers to think about them and be clear on the implications of these relationships for the larger ecology of academic work. I'm a new entrant to the academic field, but have made a decision to try and maintain rights to my work wherever possible, make sure my work is freely available, and publish with journals who support open access. This will undoubtedly limit options for publication of my best work, should I ever produce anything that might be suitable for one of the heavyweight journals. But it gives me the chills to think that I might not be able to put my work out on a website, or reprint it in a free newspaper, etc. 6) As far as the career aspect goes, I always try and reiterate to students that careers come through networks, and (as Phil Agre notes) the most important networks are those of your peers. The most common career error I see is people attempting to "network" with those further up the career ladder or in positions of power, in the belief that it might get them a job. It sometimes succeeds, but often at the cost of having to reinterpret what you're doing in values you don't necessarily share. It's easy enough to make what you're doing sound impressive when you're looking for a job, but then you've gotta end up working day in, day out in the place you end up. In my own career(s), I've been sucked in by the lure of prestige more than once, and paid the price in employment situations that have been ultimately unfulfilling. On the other hand, opportunities that come about through friends and peers turn out to be the most rewarding, because the processes by which you move into them tend to be more aligned with your true strengths. I guess I would suggest that people concerned about the career impacts of their publishing choices should feel confident that if you keep working where you're valued, maintaining your network of peers, and pursuing things you're deeply interested in then opportunities will come. They may not immediately include publication in the most prestigious journals or employment in the most vaunted institutions, but in my view these have primarily been important in the past as a way of connecting to communities of interest. In the Internet world, they're not really as critical for this purpose, and you can quite easily maintain and develop professional networks from, for example, a small technical institute in New Zealand :) Regards, Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net Eszter Hargittai wrote on 6/4/03 7:55 AM:

In an ideal world - and I'd hope this is the case in some places - tenure committees, at least at the dept level, would read one's work and not simply look at where it was published to determine its quality and contributions. For example, I don't know how many points Danny Kahneman (last year's Nobel winner in Econ) scored in Psychology (his field) for publishing a seminal piece in Econometrica (a very prestigious journal in econ) but it sounds like that was the place to publish it for the kind of impact it had on econ research. (For more: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/02/q4/1009-kahneman-b.htm )

Since this is related, I'd like to add that I've been amazed at the number of AoIR members' Web sites I've visited that do not have copies of their publications available for online access. I realize some of these are copyright related, but it's usually possible to put up a "pre-print" copy of one's paper. If not, in the least, I would hope people would make it clear on their sites that by contacting them we can obtain an e-copy via email.

For those interested in more about the Soros Open Access initiative to which Michael referred, here's their Web site: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

-------------------------

From: "Michael Gurstein" <mgurst@vcn.bc.ca> Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 21:22:02 -0500 To: <air-l@aoir.org> Subject: RE: [Air-l] Encyclopedia of Community

I then took the time to read the contract and I must admit I was appalled.

The terms of the contract, which I can dig out if anyone is interested basically indicated that I was turning over to them, essentially for free, all rights to this article which they specified should be completely original and not published in any other place or any other format. Furthermore, they stated that I could not publish this material in any other form or location (including on the web) without being in breach.

Now since this was an encyclopedia article in an area in which I do much of my publishing strictly speaking I was turning over to the publisher essentially for nothing a potentially considerable part of my current and future intellectual capital. I also was reflecting on an earlier and quite unsatisfactory experience with a publisher who chose to price my work completely out of its appropriate market based on a business model which I consider to be pernicious in the extreme.