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

[Barry Saunders]

I've wanted to join in this debate for a while, but I've been busy going through the papers for an open-access journal I'm editing, called Media-Culture. I'm working on it with the evil defender of locked-down academic publishing, Jason Wilson, and let me tell you, it's hard. He's all like, let's lock this mofo down and charge access, because only the cool kids deserve to read our awesome articles. MOO HOO HA HAA HAA HA AND WE WILL BE EVIL SENIOR PROFESSORS MOO HOO HA HA HAHA.

Ahem.

I'm all for open-access. I got into academia via Indymedia. All my work is published on Eprints and/or my blogs, under a CC licence where possible. I do think open-access journals are the way of the future, but we aren't there yet.

As Barry Wellman pointed out, running a journal costs money, and sometimes access fees are the only way to get that funding. The example of community media and citizen media is quite illustrative - many publications start out by charging for access to ensure their survival until they can move to a sustainable funding model. Boycotting them will only kill the publication - not a particularly good move for an emerging field. Community media is also illustrative for what happens when the commitment to open-access overtakes everything else - those people who work on the publication are no longer paid, and the people who take over are usually comfortable middle class people who can spare the time to help out. That can mean the difference between a hard hitting, class conscious publication and middle-class pabulum.

I'm not so sure that open-editing, which appears to have been suggested here, will work for academic publishing. Wikipedia works, for the most part, because articles there take a neutral point of view. Using wikis for argument, by and large, doesn't work. Wikipedia is for documentation, not argumentation. Open-access argument is Indymedia or sometimes Metafilter. Sometimes interesting, sometimes garbage, rarely above pedestrian.

It's also worth noting that doubleblind peer review WORKS.  It is one of the few mechanisms available that redresses the gender bias in academic writing. Any open-editing system for academic publications would have to take that into account.
http://blogs.nature.com/peer-to-peer/2008/01/doubleblind_peer_review_reveal.html

Lastly, if this is the level of academic discussion and argumentation that an open, internet-mediated journal would have.... Hoo boy. I've had more elucidating discussions on Digg.


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Barry Saunders
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http://investigativeblog.net
http://gatewatching.org
http://d-notice.net
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PhD Candidate // researcher
http://creativeindustries.qut.edu.au
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Saunders,_Barry.html
skype: barry_saunders
CRICOS No. 00213J






On 10/2/08 2:14 PM, "Christian Nelson" <xianknelson at mac.com> wrote:

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.