[Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

[Christian Nelson]

On Feb 9, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Alex Halavais wrote:

> If you think Wikipedia is open to all comers and all ideas, you  
> clearly haven't been reading the vitriol heaped upon it from the  
> margins.

I've heard that stuff, but if I can figure out how to edit on  
wikipedia, then anyone can.

> But peer review, in one form or another, is a vital piece of the  
> conversation of scholarship, and replacing it will be difficult  
> precisely because it has demonstrated its
> effectiveness.

There haven't been any alternatives to this form of review. You can't  
demonstrate the effectiveness of something when you cannot make  
comparsons.

> There is a reason Wikipedians insist on citations to peer-reviewed  
> work. They know that it represents a good collaborative filter of  
> informed peers.

I've only encounted the insistence that all research be taken into  
account, most of which is, by necessity, peer-reviewed via the  
current system. BTW, how is the current peer review system  
collaborative?

> There is a space for the exchange of ideas, where you can be your  
> own editor, where you can comment on other people's articles: it's  
> called a blog. (As an aside, have folks seen this: http:// 
> researchblogging.org/ ?)  Or, you can upload your paper onto a  
> large pre-print server. Both are very good alternatives, but they  
> do not address the problem of filtering.

That's not a viable way to conduct an exchange of ideas. Few readers  
of a journal will take the trouble to search out blogs that comment  
on that journal's content. Fewer still will find it. Separate but  
equal is an oxymoron, as folks in the US should know.

> I read a lot of things as a referee so you don't have to, and I  
> rely on my colleagues to do the same thing. If you think about it,  
> it's actually a pretty elegant distributed system. Instead of all  
> of us randomly reading the "not ready yet" or "never will be ready"  
> papers, we divide that work among us, allowing for more attention  
> to be paid to work that is most deserving of attention. Is it  
> perfect? Clearly not. But it works.

"We" divide the work among us? No, those with editorial control do.  
Sure it works . . . for you, if you are part of the in-group. But it  
doesn't work for those who aren't, regardless of the quality of their  
scholarship. Don't believe me? Look up the studies that have already  
demonstrated that a journal's editor and reviewers will reject papers  
attributed to Podunk U. authors, but then accept the very same paper  
when re-sent to the same journal with the name of an author from a  
prestigious school. If that's not evidence of how broke things are,  
then I don't know what ever could be.

> The question of open access is different from the question of  
> filtering, and contrary to what you have said in an earlier post, I  
> believe an important question.

Yeah its a different question. And it would be nice if scholars were  
able to get out from under the thumbs of the money grubbing  
publishers. But I kinda think that the issue of open exchange should  
be a lot more to folks who are supposedly committed to that as a  
defining feature of their enterprise.

> Once we have sorted out the most useful materials, it benefits  
> everyone to have them as widely available as possible. The question  
> is simply how best to make this happen, from a practical perspective.

Why would it be impractical for a journal to provide space for its  
readers to make comments, post ratings, etc.? How would it slow down  
the discussion? Your implied claims make no sense.

--Christian Nelson