Hi Sabina,
Some thoughts in response to your response.
> Dude, this is what peer review is for.
As Dan remarked, Peer review in its current stage takes ages. And it
often leaves a lot to be desired. For instance, a friend of mine
recently submitted an article based on her PhD. She is in ornithology,
and her PhD was fieldwork examining the patterns of bird populations in
Victorian (i.e.the state of Victoria in Australia) forests. One comment
in the middle of the paper was that her results were not the same as
another researcher had found. Another comment at the end was, "Well you
haven't found anything new". Also, she had done her research over the
summer of 2005-2006 and a comment, from her northern hemisphere
reviewer, was, "Well which summer was it?". Now its obvious that summer
in the southern hemisphere is December to February, and as her stated
study area was Victorian forests, the reviewer should have known better.
This is an exemplification of the same argument as why open source
software is better than proprietary software. More eyes. If someone had
been checking the peer reviewer's review, they would, hopefully, have
noticed these three basic errors. If this had been on the web, it would
have taken a very short time for the more eyes to bring this up. As it
was in academicland, the paper got rejected for publication. The process
for bringing these kinds of errors to people's notice is frankly too
slow. The process of getting things published in journals is too slow.
Regarding the profit motive of journals, I honestly feel they are taking
two bites of the cherry. Yes it costs to make a journal, but they charge
authors to submit and they charge subscribers for access. And they want
the copyright so they can try to make more money later. The process of
ranking journals as a means to assess academics for employment is thus
flawed. The journals are not in it for the good of the academy. They are
in it to make profit. Therefore it is in their interests to allow free
dissemination of ideas and it is in their interests to only accept
papers that many peers will agree with. Remembering the great many
discoveries in many disciplines that were made by those not in the
mainstream should make us realise the dangerousness of this situation.
Who is going to publish the papers that genuinely break new ground?
Remember the vitriol directed at people who have kooky ideas that turn
out to be true, malaria comes to mind. Speaking of profit, let's
remember that we are in it for profit too. We hope to secure positions
that will provide us with income, and we hope to sell books that will
contribute to our reputations so that we can get positions that provide
us an income. This creates the tension between our desire to spread
knowledge throughout the world for the benefit of mankind, and our need
to put food on our tables.
> It may promote my ideas, but it also makes them available for
plagiarism to anyone who trolls the net.
As the RIAA has discovered, the data can no longer be the source of the
income stream. Because of the ease with which people can copy music the
RIAA have had to find new ways to make money. I am not saying it is
right that people copy music, or books, I am just saying that trying to
stop them is a truly Canute like act. It has taken them a while, but the
RIAA has finally come up with a business plan that means they don't have
to try to make so much money from the data. They have realised that they
can make money from live appearances and so on. I truly believe that
people can't steal ideas. Ok, so you write something and someone passes
it off as theirs. They may be able to articulate the idea, but they
didn't do the work that caused you to come up with it. Nobody does your
stuff like you do. No one plays Pink Floyd like Pink Floyd themselves.
No one lectures like Doug Ezzy but Doug Ezzy. I would pay to see Doug
lecture. This is why Doug is employed as a lecturer. As present day
authors, like Cory Doctrow, have found, giving your books away means you
make more money. He gives his books away as text files on his website.
He charges for actual physical books and for audio books. And he has
found that since he started giving away his books he made made loads
more money. Because the data is free more people get to see it. Those
who like it are then inclined to by an actual physical book or audio book.
>Seems to me that's still the issue with the web: anyone can throw up
anything in any form, with little attention to reliability, factuality
or originality.
As far as I am concerned this is a feature. One great advance of the
web, and of things like wikipedia in particular, is that people are
aware from the get go that information is contested. None of the,
'because it is in a book it must be true' syndrome. It makes people not
take things for granted. It makes people think! And it makes people
aware that if you say something stupid the many eyes of the web will be
onto you in a New York minute.
Ok, now this is looking a bit like a rant so I will wrap it up. My basic
point is that no one owns ideas. If you want to stop the transmission of
ideas you are trying to kill culture. Gods help us this should succeed,
we would be doomed.
Regards,
Morgan Leigh
PhD Candidate
School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics
University of Queensland
religionbazaar.blogspot.com
Sabina Magliocco wrote:
> While I completely support the policy of open access, and would like to see more academic publications move to that model, there are also a number of flaws in the blogger's argument. Academics should feel free to blog if they choose to, but there may be many reasons why they might choose *not* to blog.
>
> Brief responses to the blogger's recommendations:
>
> 1. You need to improve your writing
> Seems like you haven't read much academic writing lately -- at least not the kinds I read, write and assign to my students. There is an entire cross-disciplinary movement that critically examines writing styles, especially the implicit power relations in dense, jargon-laden academic writing. It encourages experimental and community-focused writings. Many of us already write for the communities we work with as well as for more academic audiences.
>
> 2. Some of your ideas are dumb
> Dude, this is what peer review is for. Academia developed this process in order for scholars to give other scholars feedback on their ideas. I would much rather get feedback from scholars in my discipline, or in cousin disciplines, who actually understand what I'm writing about than from some random crank on the Internet.
>
> 3. The point of academia is to expand knowledge
> Yup, I agree. That's why we teach. Also, see above in terms of writing for the communities we work with and serve.
>
> 4. Blogging expands your readership
> Maybe. It also expands the number of wack-balls who email you daily. I already have to deal with several crank emails a day, on top of hundreds of messages from my students, colleagues and administration. I can't cope with more.
>
> 5. Blogging protects and promotes your ideas
> It may promote my ideas, but it also makes them available for plagiarism to anyone who trolls the net. It's quite an experience to see your own words reproduced for you in a student paper as original ideas -- only to realize they copied them from some random web page where they were posted without your authorization. Blogging would only compound this problem.
>
> 6. Blogging is Reputation
> A similar argument could be made for publication, with your reputation made by who cites you and where. We already have this system; why duplicate it in a much less controllable and reliable format?
>
> 7. Linking is better than footnotes
> Um, here's a newsflash: not everything ever written is on the web and linkable. Many of us still use (gasp!) historical sources.
>
> 8. Journals and blogs can (and should) coexist
> No argument here; I agree completely.
>
> 9. What have journals done for you lately?
> I completely support open access. But anyone who has run a journal will tell you that journals cost because production is not free. It costs to copy-edit, typeset and fact-check articles. It costs to print and distribute journals. Some of that cost could be offset by online publication, and probably will be given time; but there will still be costs involved in preparing articles for publication. You can't just throw any old thing up on the web, in any old form.
>
> Seems to me that's still the issue with the web: anyone can throw up anything in any form, with little attention to reliability, factuality or originality. At least academic publication tries to control for these to some extent.
>
> Best,
> Sabina
>
> Sabina Magliocco
> Professor and Chair
> Department of Anthropology
> California State University - Northridge
> 18111 Nordhoff St.
> Northridge, CA 91330-8244
>
> "If we want things to stay the way they are, everything will have to change." ~ Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
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