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

[Christian Nelson]

On Feb 9, 2008, at 10:37 PM, Jason Wilson wrote:

> 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.

Oh, how nobly they do strive for us! We should all be ashamed of  
having suggested otherwise.

>  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 affordances of which apparatus? There's more than one, and the  
open-source apparatus affords for more in terms of considered  
responses, if constructed with web 2.0 principles in mind.

>  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.

Uh oh. Now you've done it danah. Me thinks you've pissed someone off.  
Wait, what am I saying? Everyone else on the list apparently knows  
beyond the shadow of a doubt that no one at a traditional peer- 
reviewed journal would ever carry out a personal vendetta against an  
author. Surely what they've suggested is right: All that academics  
pursue is the truth, not  flattery. They all have thick skins, and  
are indeed uncomfortable when people kiss their asses. The fact that  
I've witnessed professors at my PhD alma mater and colleagues at two  
top-tier departments scream at each other in meetings or engage in  
other childish behavior because their egos were bruised, or attempt  
to throw graduate students out of the PhD program for having the  
audacity to question their professors, should not in any way be taken  
to suggest otherwise. Nor should such behavior at other top tier  
communication departments as reported to me by my past grad. school  
chums who've done well. So, fear not! Keep telling truth to power!