From the Globe (registration\/fees required)<\/a> comes an article by Elizabeth Church about the price of academic journals, and the emerging movement towards open access academic journals: <\/p>\n

This year, the University of Toronto’s library system will spend $20-million on acquisitions. But less than one-third of that money will go to books. The majority will pay for the rising subscription costs of academic journals… <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Too bad, and nicely ironic, that the Globe stuck the article behind a subscription fee).<\/p>\n

Anyway, good article, the main point being that U of T spends $13 million on journals every year. Leaving $7 million for books. Jesus. <\/p>\n

I recently had a brief exchange about some of these issues with Alexandre<\/a> in the comment thread of one of Austin’s posts<\/a>… talking about just this issue, more or less: that anthropolists have much to tell us\/much to research about the the evolution of online and real world communities. And yet: a) they are mostly not doing it and b) when they do do it, their findings are published in unavailable academic journals.<\/p>\n

It’s very funny the way this is discussed though: peer review is expensive, academic reputations are based on publishing in prestigious journals etc. And yet, academics are not paid for their contributions (or are paid pennies), I don’t know (but I doubt) whether peer reviewers are paid either (can anyone confirm that?). <\/p>\n

So journals get their content for free, and charge exorbitant fees for the providing:
\na) a ranking\/authority service
\nb) a distribution service<\/p>\n

But they in fact are not legitimately charging for content, since they do not pay for the content. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Globe (registration\/fees required) comes an article by Elizabeth Church about the price of academic journals, and the emerging movement towards open access academic…<\/p>\n

Continue Readingexpensive academic journals<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-openmovement","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughmcguire.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}