[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

[Ingbert Floyd]

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