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

[Mathieu O'Neil]

Hi all

Been reading this exchange with great interest as it intersects with 
what I'm currently interested in - the tension between traditional 
learned authority and newer "wisdom of the crowd" models a la 
Wikipedia, Amazom reviews, etc. The problem with the mass (and 
anonymous) "anyone can review" model is that it is very hard to 
credentialise people - i.e. remember what happened when Canadian Amazon 
glitched and it was revealed that authors had been reviewing their own 
works, plus not only getting their friends and relatives to give their 
works glowing reviews but also to give bad reviews to their 
competitors. As for WP, it's a beautiful thing, but as someone said you 
are expected to provide references to "authoritative" sources.

Now, it's the job of new entrants to "challenge the logic of the field" 
in the name of the field's founding principles - academic excellence, 
truth, what have you. It's normal that more established journals will 
be less receptive to new paradigms - just like more established 
universities are less receptive to new disciplines (I was talking to a 
US Communication professor recently about why so many big US 
Communication Depts are in the Mid-West for example... historical / 
tech reasons but also to distinguish themselves from older faculties).

Um, rambling too many things together. OK, what I'm trying to say is 
that there are two issues - the production of sound research on the one 
hand (as filtered by recognised authorities in their fields) and the 
original point, the increasing copyrighting of academic content - and 
conflating them is problematic, I think. Open access to content for 
_consumers_ of knowledge is easily achievable (release the good data) 
whereas open _production_ of knowledge does require some expertise: 
hackers had a built-in sorting mechanism (can person X code to a 
certain standard or not?), Wikipedia does not, which makes it instantly 
contestable and very fluid, not something you really want too much for 
scientific / academic production.

Now, I'm not saying that expert peer review is wonderful - in fact 
there is an interesting paper called "Publishing as Prostitution? 
Choosing Between One's Own Ideas and Academic Failure" by Bruno Frey an 
economist which argues that in order to survive in academia authors who 
submit to journals have to slavishly agree with whatever changes 
reviewers demand or face rejection - a form of self-mutilation or 
"intellectual prostitution" (he argues that editors should take a much 
more active role in the decision). There is also probably some truth to 
the "unfair treatment according to which institution you are from" 
argument. The answer to both though is that if one is serious about 
one's work then one will publish wherever and that if one's ideas are 
interesting then reviewers will support them (I know I do - or try to).

cheers,
mathieu



On 10/02/2008, at 9:36 AM, Christian Nelson wrote:

>
> 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
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Dr Mathieu O'Neil
Adjunct Research Fellow
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
College of Arts and Social Science
The Australian National University

E-mail: mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au
Tel.: (61 02) 61 25 38 00
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