In this light it is interesting why AAG just switched its journals from Blackwell to Routledge, a division of Taylor and Francis.
Given the furore earlier this year when the American Association of Anthropologists switched (to Wiley-Blackwell!) because it was handled without transparency, I wonder if there will be a similar question about this switch. There doesn't seem to be a lot of transparency in this decision either, especially financial.
The AAA said this about Blackwell:
"Members of the Executive Board saw Wiley-Blackwell's stellar reputation for creative partnerships with learned societies, its substantial investment in innovative technology and its world-wide network of offices as providing AAA with the greatest potential to propel AnthroSouce to the cutting edge of digital publishing and expand the readership of AAA's publications and the dissemination of anthropological research to critical new international audiences."
--http://savageminds.org/2007/09/26/governance-transparency-and-sacred-bundles/
But if Blackwell is so stellar why has AAG dropped them? The AAG announcement says that there were four companies who submitted proposals-was Blackwell one of them? How many were sent out? (The AAA sent out nine and got back six.)
__
Jeremy W. Crampton
Assoc. Prof. & Graduate Director, Geography
Editor, Cartographica
Department of Geosciences
PO Box 4105
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Ga. 30302-4105
(404) 413-5771 <-- NOTE NEW NUMBER
http://monarch.gsu.edu/jcrampton/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Justus Uitermark" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: Paying for academic journals
>What surprised me is the ease with which a number of (non open access) journals moved to a commercial publisher. I know there are benefits but I think that these are generally overstated while the long-disadvantages may be considerable (even when trustees try to prevent these from occurring through special arrangements). Many of the advantages of commercial publishers (good on-line publishing for instance or advertisement) could be achieved by editorial collectives, especially if they work together in a sufficiently large professional association. I always wondered what would happen if, say, the editorial board of Political Geography collectively decided to take its journal elsewhere. It would create many short-term problems but it would help very much in the long term. Revenues that now go to Elsevier could then be channelled elsewhere, to open access journal for instance.
|