[Air-L] open-access is the future: no, it is not! only if it is non-corporate: the capitalist political economy of academic journals and open access

Fri Feb 8 06:57:28 PST 2008

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/openaccesscitations2.pdf 
. 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.pdf 
. 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 at 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=9780415961325&pc= 

"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).