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| Hmm... which is easier to forward?, by nengard via Flickr |
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Recently I attended a debate called Intellectual Property Rights: Wrong for Developing Countries?" at the National Academies in Washington, D.C. The two speakers were Bruce Lehman, Chairman of the International Intellectual Property Institute, and John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science Commons. I had sort of hoped for entertainment purposes that one of them would have take the position "Yes, they are," and the other "No, they're not," but life isn't as simple as that and the two actually seemed not to be particularly at odds with each other.
In fact, it was an area where they tacitly agreed that caught my attention the most. Both, at one point or another, referred to scholarly journals as "content providers". In particular I found it odd when it was remarked that academics passing around photocopies of scholarly articles and forwarding them among one another online was leading to rising subscription fees for journals and hurting their profitability.
Well, as someone working in higher education, I don't really think of scholarly journals as content providers. I think of the academics that research and write the articles as content producers, and the journals merely as distribution channels. Thus, if academics are passing articles around using the Internet, it's because the Internet is a superior distribution channel to the journals themselves -- even when those journals are themselves online unless they also offer open access.
Furthermore, even if journals are having a hard time making ends meet, is that really a dreadful thing? Academics already volunteer to serve on journal editorial boards as part of their commitment to service. With free technologies like the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems, it's not difficult even for an academic department with fairly limited resources to publish its own journal online, complete with peer review and open access. A good example is the International Journal of Education and Development using ICTs published by the Distance Education Centre of the University of the West Indies. Given this, as university departments take the final step to publish journals online, the demise of the subscription based journal model will seem little different then that of buggy whip makers during the rise of the automobile.
There is one important aspect of subscription based scholarly journals that isn't addressed by simply replacing them with online open access alternatives, and that is the relative prestige that publication in different journals offers. Each discipline has its pecking order when it comes to what journals in which one would most like to see one's article be published, and especially for those on the tenure track, that's a potentially perilous aspect to take lightly. At the same time, however, given the advantages of open access and online distribution, how long can this save subscription based journals?
In fairness to John Wilbanks, he was a passionate proponent of increasing access to knowledge, and he did remark that it seems like journal publishers are among those industries that have done a poor job finding new business models that work when faced with the Internet. But I wonder if it's merely a failure of their imagination. I'm hard pressed to think of a way they can add value when every aspect of scholarly articles from concept to peer review to distribution can now be handled without them. Could it be that they're simply dinosaurs in a world where it has begun to snow?
tags: washington-dc united states science-research
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A useful report - and, yup - they're dinosaurs :-) Your point about the academic community adding value to scholarly journals, rather than the publisher, is spot on. I exempt journals published by the scientific and scholarly societies from this, but the commercial publishers have been feeding on academia for years. What other industry gets its raw material free of charge and then charges those raw material producers to read what they've produced?!
Very large journals, such as those published by some of the scientific societies, clearly need an infrastructure and people through which to publish. But many journals out of the tens of thousands published have small readership and, probably, even smaller number of authors. Such journals can quite readily be run on a collaborative basis and made entirely free of charge. I don't regard author charging as an OA form of publication - only journals that are free to submit to and free to read are genuine OA - what I call the 'platinum route', since the 'gold route' to OA in the official mind has become associated with author charging.
Information Research - http://InformationR.net/ir/ - the OA journal I publish and edit (helped by a growing band of collaborators) has been publishing some case studies on OA journals in recent issues - all of which take the platinum route. The more the academic community understands that scholarly publication is just as scholarly through this route, as it is through commercial toll-charged journals, the better.
twilson (United Kingdom) · Jul 31st, 2007 11:51 pm
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Hi Katie. I can't speak to the motivations of legislatures or whether WIPO and its ilk truly have developing countries' interests at heart. You mention remittance, but academics don't usually directly see any money from the research they conduct or the articles that stem from it. The coin of our particular realm is reputation. Reputation comes from being cited (among other things), and being cited comes from being read. As such, it's in academics' interest for their articles to be as widely available as possible, and that means open access, whether green, gold, platinum, or what have you.
Steve Foerster · Grand Savanne, Salisbury (Dominica) · Aug 02nd, 2007 2:01 am
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