In general, I agree with Christian Fuchs. And thank you very much for sending out the DOAJ link! Resources like this enable us to move more easily to open-access publishing venues. However, I feel he has misrepresented my position a bit, so let me clarify what I was trying to say. I don't think it is *impossible* to create a no-author-charges no-reader-charges model. All I was saying, is that I have thought about this a lot, and I'm not sure how it would best be funded. You accuse me of claiming that academic articles are commodities. I'm not sure what, exactly, a commodity is (I've seen conflicting definitions). However, I do know, that if you want something to exist on the internet, the way our current "global" economic system works, somebody has to pay somebody some money. Computers, fiber-optic cables, electrical power, maintenance personel; none of that is free. Then there are more direct costs, such as paying authors and reviewers so they have time to write, and paying someone to do the indexing and organization work so you can find the article. One way or another, all of this costs money, because in the end, people are doing the work, and people need food and shelter, and want quality of life. And we don't live in a barter economy (thankfully!). Thus, to take a step back, and analyze one of your statements, writing journal articles is not "free" labor. It is a cost currently borne primarily by Universities. Those of us who are full-time employed academics are, as a condition of our employment, expected to write journal articles. In the case of pre-tenured faculty, their job security depends on it. You are right in saying that journal publishers *do not* bear these costs. But they do bear other costs. There is nothing stopping us as academics from simply sending out mass emails to people, with our articles as attachments. Or from purchasing our own web spaces and posting our writings there (a tact which many people, academic and non-academic, in fact, take). But the journal system seems to have certain advantages (topical co-location, expert recommendation in the form of peer-review, indexing and link structure creation, advertisement of new authors and new ideas, etc.) over these other methods of distribution, such that most people want to keep it around. To take another step back, anything on the internet is not really *free* to access in some universal sense. If you want personal internet access, most people have to pay someone for it. And if you go to the public library in the US, you still have to pay transportation expenses, even if the only such expenses are time, food, and new shoes. I know most of these economic models do not factor time into account, but that's a pretty big expense in many cases. I used to be poor (I doubled my income by becoming a PhD student), and let me tell you, we (my old room-mates and I) liked the idea of a public library, but it was impractical for us to take advantage of its resources, even though they were "free". Maybe what I've written above is debatable. Certainly, there might be other metaphors to use besides economic metaphors to describe how we live our lives, and spend our time. But in the end, if we're going to talk about something being free as in "free beer", I think it is easier to stick with economic metaphors, since it will avoid confusion from mixing too many metaphors together. So, how *do* I consider this issue? Well, for me it's an issue of processes and consequences, on individual, local, and societal levels. I recognize that the internet is not "free", but I also recognize it's a phenomenal distribution mechanism, when unhampered by subscription barriers. I think that it is desirable for academic information to be free as in "free beer", for both the producers to publish and the consumers to obtain. But I also value some of the services that current publishing mechanisms and traditions supply. I am open to new ideas for conducting this process, though after a recent experience with an open reviewing process, I'm a bit more cautious in my endorsements of such processes before all the kinks have been worked out. But in the end, I feel one has to be realistic, and recognize there are *some* costs that have to be borne by *somebody*. The question for me, is who, and how? I like the organization-subsidized model. I think there is a lot of benefit from adopting such a model, and that the publication process *can* be insulated (to some degree) from the financial pressures. But I recognize the criticisms of this model, and as a result, I don't think that this model should be universally adopted. There need to be alternatives so we don't have an oligarchy of organizations which control academic publishing. After spending an hour reviewing the list Christian Fuchs sent out (http://www.doaj.org/), I noticed that there are a number of open access journals on the list that are author-pays, and another group of journals which are funded by large corporations (IBM being the most salient one). IBM's reputation has changed recently, but it used to behave a lot like Microsoft does now. I'd be a little concerned if our journals were in such hands. Other organizations which fund journals are universities. In general, I like the idea of a University Funded model, but especially when US state-owned universities are the ones responsible for the funding, the funding will always be tenuous, as ill-considered legislation, budget cuts due to mismanaged government funds, and poor management are recurring realities of the state-school environment. Maybe rich, elite universities could be the ones responsible for funding and maintaining academic publishing venues as their funding and administration is much more reliable, but not everybody is comfortable with granting those institutions even more power over how academic work functions. I am comfortable with it, because I see it as a manner in which those universities can exercise academic social responsibilitiy by helping to fund a chunk of the academic distribution process. However, I would not want the academic publishing process to be *solely* concentrated in the hands of such a limited *number* of institutions, whether they are elite or not. Which is one reason the current drive to consolidate publishers worries me. That leaves non-academic, non-profit organizations of various sorts. And this is also problematic because there are only so many of them, and most of them are biased toward certain kinds of funding, thus potentially creating a lack of academic production in certain fields simply because no foundations have been created by wealthy benefactors interested in supporting academic publication in those areas. For all of these reasons, I think the marketplace of academic ideas is still, currently, better served by exploring a diversity of options. Let us have a diversity of organizational-supported models developed. To hedge our bets, let us also have non-profit author-pay models, and non-profit reader-pay models, in case these models prove to have unexpected benefits. It is only once we have created various alternatives, and seen the consequences of our actions, that we will be in a better position to determine what the future of academic publishing ought to look like. As long as we maintain a diversity of options, we will have many choices of publishing routes to take. Therefore, at this stage, about the only boycott I would support is a boycott of for-profit academic publishers. It seems there has been a wave of profiteering in academic publishing recently, where for-profit publishers have raised their prices at 5-6 *times* the rate of inflation for over 20 years, and for questionable gains in services provided. Libraries have been unable to resist these price-hikes, because they cannot drop their subscriptions without significantly damaging the ability of their faculty to do their work. The significance of this, is that, it used to be the case that individual professors would purchase individual subscriptions to most journals in their field, out of their own salary. But these days, this practice has all but disappeared, because few professors can afford this luxury any more. Now, the for-profit/non-profit line is not the cleanest line in the world, as there are non-profits who behave like for-profits, and vice-versa. But I think it is a fair simplification of reality, and the exceptions are few and far enough between, that one can learn about them via word-of-mouth. And blog posts. And listserv discussions. Ingbert -- ========================================== Ingbert Floyd PhD Student Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign http://ingbert.org/ || skype: spacesoon Check out the unofficial GSLIS Wiki: http://www.gslis.org/ "Dream in a pragmatic way." -Aldous Huxley -- ========================================== Ingbert Floyd PhD Student Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign http://ingbert.org/ || skype: spacesoon Check out the unofficial GSLIS Wiki: http://www.gslis.org/ "Dream in a pragmatic way." -Aldous Huxley