Comments on: expensive academic journals

By: hugh

hugh — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:17:51 +0000

christine says: medical journals make most of their money from pharmaceutical companies that pay the journal to make official reprints of articles favourable to their drugs.

By: Alexandre

Alexandre — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:35:21 +0000

I would still call your position idealism.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:02:18 +0000

i’ve left off idealism as a convincing motivating force … in favour of pragmatism. OA means: more data exchange, means: more innovative solutions. that is OA will result in “better” = “more useful” academia.

By: Alexandre

Alexandre — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 17:05:38 +0000

Yep, it’s one reason for OA, related to visibility and impact. There are many other reasons.
My personal favourite, as an anthropologist, is that OA may mean that our work is available to some of the people with whom we work. Despite the digital divide, people will usually have ways to access online material if it’s valuable to them.
The archival reason is that it’s much easier to store OA material for a longer time than material from proprietary databases. It’s actually a good argument for XML use as well as an argument for OA. Most academic articles are available as PDF files which may be an issue in the future.
A more “engineering” approach to OA would have to do with the efficiency of sharing academic articles as opposed to relying on a single publisher’s site (a bit like distributed computing as opposed to supercomputers).
Then there’s the ease of finding the academic articles themselves and keeping up with that material. Kind of the same effect as adopting standards for publication but taken from a completely different angle.
Then there’s the control of ownership of the results. Not exactly like copyright, more to do about self-empowerment for the academic community as a whole.
Many, many other reasons. But several scholars are reluctant. Academia is about as slow to react as Old Media, but for very different reasons.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 16:46:22 +0000

"in fact quite sad that the article isnâ€t freely available. It would make it easier for us to blog it, share it on Facebook, tell our colleagues about it, and potentially increase broader readership of The Globe and Mail." exactly the reason academic journals should be free online.

By: Alexandre

Alexandre — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 15:33:26 +0000

Open Access (OA) is a very important issue, these days. Been blogging about it myself. The key reference about OA is Stevan Harnad who, as it so happens, resides in Montreal. You're right, academic publishers do not pay peer-reviewers and academic authors rarely, if ever, make any money on their publications (including books). But the issue of Open Access is much deeper than costs. For instance, OA increases visibility which increases a text's impact. Some of us radical enthusiasts (IOW, those who are crazy idealists like you and me) even think that OA may help bridge the gap between the Ivory Tower and the population at large. I'll look for a copy of this Globe article on Lexis-Nexis but it's in fact quite sad that the article isn't freely available. It would make it easier for us to blog it, share it on Facebook, tell our colleagues about it, and potentially increase broader readership of The Globe and Mail.