-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Cyberspace Redux: open access journals Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:37:13 -0500 From: Ellen Moody <ellen2 at JIMANDELLEN.ORG> Reply-To: 18th Century Interdisciplinary Discussion <C18-L at lists.psu.edu> To: C18-L at LISTS.PSU.EDU
I went to lecture by a librarian yesterday where she talked of issues in cyberspace which affect academics. Since her stance is one I took up when I last wrote about this, I thought I'd put a little of what she said on this list.
She is the Digital Repository Services Librarian where I teach and the theme of her talk, "changes in scholarly communcation." She opened by asking four questions she thought researchers and writers would want to know, "how much research do you have access to?" "Who can access your research?" "Is everyone who ought to reading your article?" "How can you achieve tenure and promotion?"
She then launched into what she said was the explanation for the skyrocketing costs of publishing scholarship. A big group of corporate publishers bought up a huge group of journals, sold these as electronic texts to libraries, and now continually jack up prices. The journals are bundled so the libraries cannot buy just the few good ones they might want; they have to buy them all to get the best few. For libraries when you stop a subscription and you have hard copies, you get to keep them, but when you stop a subscription of something in cyberspace, the archives are taken away.
Libraries don't have the money to support the greed of those at the head of these conglomerate. A few quality journals did not sell out but most are subject to these publishing corporations. This is the present situation about existing e-journals which are also paper publications. Right now too the feeling is that if a publication is not in paper or as a book, it does not count towards a career (the prestigious journal which publishes in cyberspace usually also produces a paper copy).
Traditional peer-reviewed journals have their troubles too. There are not enough reviewers, prices are jacked up. It takes years to get an article out. There are too many in the pipe-line and more keep coming for this is the way to get tenure. Along with a monograph. But many libraries no longer have money to buy monographs.
For some libraries in the US, the response has been to form consortiums and try to bargain with the corporations as a group (solidarity) for a better price from the Big Group.
Another better (it was implied) response would be to support open access journals. Open access journals offer free availability & the reality of many more citations of and influence by your work on other people's. And the author does have control of his or her text. They do have less costs: they still have to produce the first copy, and to preserve the text. But they don't have to reproduce & disseminate the texts. Open access journals she thought generally publish quicker & offer better services to the writers.
She then told us about SPARC, an Association of American Research Librarians, a group addressing the dysfunctional economics of academic publishing today. They mean to use CUREs, an act which asks that *taxpayers have access to tax-payer funded research*. (Note that.)
Meanwhile "the rest of the world," i.e., the UK (in their The Welcome Trust archive), Australia, New Zealand and the Scandanavian countries are creating open access sites galore. The NIH in the US offered open access online space, and so few in the US took advantage of it, that its initiative is now an abject failure. They need to mandate that people deposit documents.
Why adoption is slow? A lot of journals do allow self-archiving. So why not do it? Few know about the process; fewer care. Open access will kill peer review and change whole system. Distrust. The current ideology of tenure and its hierarchies makes exclusion the basis of distinguishing the scholar and professional from the ordinary person. And you get nothing for it if what you are looking for is an immediate reward in terms of money, and another punch in the ticket towards tenure promotion. Survey shows that open access and online presence increases citations of your work enormously.
She had made a lovely picture of a crystal ball on one of her slides, and prophesies that the scholarly monograph will continue its decline, more innovative projects on the horizon will emerge, and tenure bases and promotion will change. So what else is new?
Her job is to proselytize and she wants to fill her space. So at the end of the meeting I showed her my site and (if she meant what she said) she promised in the next week or so to put most of my website into a permanent repository in cyberspace.
It's hard to get faculty to pay attention. Who was at this meeting? Five people: one in medicine; one in public affairs who has used the NTIS for years (a government archive) and said he was once threatened by a corporation when he gave a paper exposing some ruthless destruction of backlists of reports, books, and information. Two librarians, a man from the computer science department. Jim and me.
It was exciting when Ms. S enthused and offered her statistics and graphs, and colored slides. This kind of change is healthy, beautifully social and inclusive. It's what I tried to talk about earlier: not replicating in cyberspace the old exclusionary practices which privilege a status-endowed elite and isolate everyone else to be subject to those in power they end up with wherever chance has landed them in physical local space.
Utopian? She didn't think so and if I had had better stenography I could've taken down her statistics.
She did offer some papers online to read:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm
http://www.arl.org/pubscat/pubs/openaccess/
This one tells you how free online availability increases numbers of citations and influence:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6837/full/411521a0_fs.html
Ellen
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