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

[McLaughlin, Lisa M. Dr.]

I have no reason in particular to defend the IJOC. Still, to offer some response to the questions raised by Christian (in his message directed to Danah):

1. "Does the IJOC allow reader commentary on articles?"

Yes. From IJOC website:

"Readers are invited to submit comments and responses to articles that appear in the International Journal of Communication. In order to submit comments you will need to be a registered subscriber to the journal. Comments and responses should be limited to discussions of particular articles or reviews and will appear as appendages to the original journal piece. Authors will be encouraged to reply to reader responses, if they wish; and discussion threads may thus be created. Reader contributions may be removed by the Editors on grounds of irrelevance and/or inappropriate tone."

I objected to a piece that appeared in the first issue of IJOC, in which the author repeated a number of points/arguments made by critical scholars-in particular feminist scholars-without citing these (and I assume that the lapse had to do with "overlooking" feminist scholarship as opposed to being familiar with it and failing to cite it). I wrote to Larry Gross, and he encouraged me to submit a comment about this. I didn't do so because it seemed to me a case where part of the problem was that the article wasn't sufficiently vetted (i.e., reviewed), and I didn't think that there was a good reason to have a dialogue with the author about this. Still, to their credit, the editors of IJOC do offer the opportunity for some dialogue.

2. "Does it allow readers to rank the published articles in terms of their value, validity, etc. of the articles like books are evaluated on Amazon.com?" It's my understanding that this is not a feature of IJOC; however, this sort of populism would probably be as helpful as it is on Amazon.com. Why rank articles? Of course, it's subjective (the entire publishing process is highly subjective), but this is so subjective as to be meaningless. E.G.: each time I teach Introduction to Women's Studies, I look at Amazon.com, among other sites, to see what's currently available so far as textbooks go. Almost invariably, each Intro to WMS text has a couple of readers' comments by WMS instructors who like the book and a couple of readers' comments by undergraduates who hate the text (often because it's about feminism and/or cost too much). What do we learn about the text? Next to nothing.

3. "Does it allow for readers to peruse all articles that were cited in order to champion those that the editors wrongly relegated to the scrap heap?" It's not clear to me what is meant here precisely, but it appears as though it might be related to readers having access to those submissions that were rejected. If this interpretation is correct, it's not apparent to me that most authors would wish to have their rejected submissions available for all to read and comment upon. I should "out" myself as founding editor and co-editor of Feminist Media Studies, a Routledge journal published by the behemoth Taylor and Francis Ltd. As such, I can verify that the journal publishing world isn't a democracy, and I doubt that it is so, or would come close to being so, in the context of open access, interactive, internet-based publication. If I provide any examples to illustrate, I will have violated the trust of authors who have submitted to the journal, as well as the reviewers, etc. But, if you want what's been "relegated to the scrap heap" (an expression that's kind of insulting, actually) to be publicized so as to show up the editors, you're mostly causing harm to the authors, in my opinion.

This isn't to say that there isn't a great deal of room for improvement. I'm editor of a corporate-owned journal, but I also prefer a model of sustainable open access and independent media [mostly I'm just an academic schlepping through various challenges like everyone else]. I hope that some of us who are editors of journals owned by conglomerates might try to edge the decision-makers toward positioning journals so that access is more freely available and, perhaps eventually, toward changing business-as-usual.

Although the current, traditional model may eventually collapse under pressure, the consumerist, populist model isn't the answer because it can be incorporated into the prevailing model too easily and in ways that don't address digital/development divides.

Regards,

Lisa