________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Salvatore Engel-DiMauro [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 2:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Paying for academic journals
> Would it not be appropriate, then, as mentioned already in a different
> discussion, to have a moratorium on publishing? What is stopping such a
> strategy from being devised and implemented? The problem seems to return
> to the internal politics of academic institutions, as Bruce and others
> had indicated, and such institutions, like publishers, are also
> exploitative of education/research workers such as us.
Well, notwithstanding the impracticality of a moratorium, what I'm suggesting actually pushes in a different direction. I'm suggesting that it might be valuable to rethink academic publishing to make it more broadly accessible, rather than to throw it out entirely.
For example, WRT to Allen's point about the free labor associated with the peer review process, what if we were to throw out blind peer review? Is this not just an awkward mechanism to solve problems (I dunno, of an overproduction of academic texts? Of the need to vet content based on authenticated expert identity?) that might be more easily solved in other ways?
Look at this in-progress book, for example:
<http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/>
[warning: not an academic book!]
So the in-progress draft is openly published. Each chapter allows reviewers to add comments on specific paragraphs of the content.
Reviewers can see each other's comments. As it evolves, users who subscribe to the book can get notice of the revisions in their feed
readers. And even when it gets released as a final physical text, I presume the free online version (with the exact same content) will be
available as well.
I'm curious what we might learn from *these* kinds of examples.
Bruce
|