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

[Jason Wilson]

"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."

Thank you Lisa, for expressing succinctly what the vast majority of us in academe, and academic publishing, try to do. 

It's impossible to disagree with the claim (which is therefore actually a platitude) that it would be better for everyone if scholarly research were freely available to whomever wanted to use it. I've heard people who actually work in academic publishing say the same thing. But a decision to immediately  boycott all closed-source journals could only be premised on a reductive analysis of how academic publishing works, and by ignoring what the people within this system are trying to achieve, and more importantly, what they've done already.  It might play well to the crowd, but it also ignores the affordances of the apparatuses of academic publishing - including its capacity to facilitate considered responses to complex problems. 

The logical extension of a boycott, of course, is not publishing books with closed-source publishers, and indeed not making any appearance in any medium or forum that doesn't relay its content openly, right now. I wonder if people have thought this course of action through, or if they're actually prepared to take this as far as the underlying logic of their argument demands. Working with publishers might actually help to achieve concrete goals like having them open up their massive archives (under conditions of a boycott, where's their incentive to do this?) and crucially it would help to maintain the communities around existing journals. 

Do we really want a journal like Feminist Media Studies to disappear because of a submissions boycott? Putting it in concrete terms like this might help us actually think about the possible consequences of big ideas like this. Big publishers might be a lot less discomfited - at the level of the bottom line - by the disappearance of some fantastic humanities journals than we'd like to think, and it would mostly be scholars who'd suffer. Isn't it better, more effective,  to simply do all you can to support emerging open access journals - including publishing your research there, acting as a peer reviewer, guest editing, like so many of us already do - and at the same time work at encouraging publishers towards open-access (they're heading that way - all they need is a business model - do we really think that they're not apprised of these issues too?). Isn't anything else just grandstanding, or fundamentalism? 

I'll declare my interest - I'm Reviews Editor of Convergence. That's the journal that danah decided to name in her original post, having just been published  in the special issue on Convergence Culture. 

Jason Wilson






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