[Air-L] book prices and the contradictions of the political economy of academic publishing

Wed Mar 9 15:47:13 PST 2011

Hello colleagues,

This is a very interesting discussion about academic publishing. Thanks 
to Charles for having inflamed it.

I think there is a contradiction between democratic access to academic 
knowledge and the stratified character of the academic system with two 
colliding poles.

1) The empire of capitalist academia:

The academic publishing market is highly concentrated, the book and 
journal market is controlled by a few companies. These companies have 
huge personnel and monetary resources and acceptance in the academic 
community. Therefore they act as gatekeepers of academic reputation. It 
is telling that an academic reputation generation mechanism like Social 
Sciences Citation Index is itself owned by a capitalist company. What is 
the share of open access journals in SSCI? Very low. What is the number 
of citations of open access journals in comparison to corporate 
journals? Etc. The ranking, classification, assessment, impact 
factor-culture of the academia is an expression of the instrumental 
logic of accumulation, so acaademia itself is a capitalist system in a 
specific sense as being a system of accumulation. Academia is dominated 
by technological rationality - no surprise in a capitalist society. The 
generation of academic capital is largely shaped by capitalist 
publishing houses that control mechanisms for generating academic capital.

And if one wants to work as an academic, then it is very difficult or 
maybe even impossible to avoid being complicit in the capitalism of 
academia because you are forced to attain tenure, gain reputation, etc 
if you want to survive and live as an academic.

2) The multitude of academic knowledge commons:

The reaction to these stratified structures is dissatisfaction of 
scholars, the insight that the capitalist academic empire creates 
inequality (for scholars in developing countries, in countries where 
neoliberalism strikes universities, libraries and employmnet conditions 
of academics especially hard, etc) and as a result: the demand for 
academic knowledge commons and a democratic academia.

This demand is channeled into academic open access/content projects 
(journals, publishing houses, etc). But one should not be idealistic: 
open access within a capitalist economy is difficult to organize, free 
within capitalism always ends up as serving capitalist interests. 
Academic publishing work needs to be organized, and in capitalism this 
is most efficiently be done in the form of the exploitation of wage 
labour. Keeping open access democratic and free requires non-profit 
strategies. There simply is no academic knowledge to sell if you base a 
project on the insight that for democratic reasons knowledge should be 
freely accessible. So non-commodification must be the rule. But then it 
is difficult to organize the organizational work, it can mainly be done 
a) based on voluntary labour, b) based on donations. In any case, 
running a non-profit academic open-access publishing project is hard 
work (I know what I am talking about) and you are facing tough 
competition. Nonetheless, the vision of going beyond the empire of 
capitalist academia is important and something to struggle for. 
Non-profit open access publishing is academic class struggle. But there 
are unequal conditions for this struggle.
One should not idealize open access: it can easily be transformed into a 
profitable business, see for example the accumulation strategy of 
Bentham, which created hundreds of open access journals that are based 
on very high author fees. Author fees create a new stratification 
mechanism, etc.

=> The contradiction between the empire of capitalist academia and  the 
multitude of academic knowledge commons

=> 3) The contradiction between these two poles creates a dilemma for 
the single scholar:
Supporting the publishing strategies of academic monopoly capital is at 
the same time the ideological reproduction of and complicity in 
maintaining the inequality of the empire of capitalist academia. 
Supporting only open access publishing strategies risks marginalization 
of reputation, cutting of department funding, lack of citations, etc and 
in the end unemployment. At the same time these projects are the only 
way to create cracks, fissures and holes in the empire and the chance to 
overcome it and to establish a democratic academy. This is a vicious 
cycle and difficult terrain to navigate.

4) The problem is that there is no easy solution, acting within systemic 
contradictions is What is the solution? To be aware of the the 
contradictions and to work within the sytem against the system in order 
to explode it.

That's the political economy of academic publishing today. It's time to 
question capitalism and its effects on academia and our lives (and that 
is what is happening in Maddison, WI, Egypt, etc NOW).

Best,
Christian

--
Prof. Christian Fuchs
Chair in Media and Communication Studies
Department of Informatics and Media
Uppsala University
Kyrkogårdsgatan 10
Box 513
751 20 Uppsala
Sweden
christian.fuchs at im.uu.se
Tel +46 (0) 18 471 1019
http://fuchs.uti.at
http://www.im.uu.se
NetPolitics Blog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blog
Editor of tripleC: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable 
Information Society http://www.triple-c.at
Book "Internet and Society" (Paperback, Routledge 2010)

Am 3/9/11 10:46 PM, schrieb Alejandro Tortolini:
> Think this a great discussion. This may be useful, about paper vs. ebook
> costs:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?_r=1
>
> And about the future of public libraries:
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/digital-underclass-what-happens-when-the-libraries-die/14554
>
> Personally, I´m worried about the prohibitive prices of North America´s
> books, wich makes another cultural barrier for the spreading of knowledge.
> Best,
>
> Alejandro Tortolini
> Scitech journalist - Teacher
> Buenos Aires - Argentina
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