The overlap between "they" and "we" is at least substantial. But
given the huge expenditures made on commercial publishers' products,
it would be a reasonable second question to ask whether "they", who
have to find the money to pay those bills, have reasons for reluctance
to challenge the expensive model in favor of a less expensive one.
The first book-length proposal for open-access publishing appeared 20
years ago -- I co-edited it. (*A Subversive Proposal for Scholarly
Publishing* [Washington 1995].) At that time, the presence of big
commercial publishers in online publishing was small. The excellent
idea has not lacked for proponents in that time, during which the big
commercial publishers have done very well indeed. Today's
sexagenarian provosts and deans and chairs were fire-breathing
quadragenarian associate professors then. The persistence of the old
model seems to me to require explanation. My observation is that, far
from making science and scholarship private, it is a system that
succeeds in making a vast outpouring of work available, almost always
free to the end user, to millions of interested readers around the
world. Yes, it's not free to the institution or the library, but the
financial model persists and even thrives and institutions do find the
money to pay the bills, hate it though we might. That is remarkable
success. How do we make another model more attractive?
jo'd
On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 9:47 AM, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I can’t speak to the point that David Meadows was making, but I was saying
> that it doesn’t matter how seriously (or not) authors take non-commercial
> venues. It only matters how seriously the members of funding and tenure
> committees take them.
>
> To the extent that these groups overlap, then it would be helpful for those
> in the academy who make funding decisions to lead by example by submitting
> their own work where they believe it will be most effectively accessed, and
> certainly by advocating for different judgment criteria within their
> committees. For the rest of us, however, it simply doesn’t matter what *we*
> take seriously - we have to submit work so that the risk of our judges not
> taking it seriously is minimized. Moreover, our opinion on the matter will
> not influence that of our judges. So the claim, in this context, that “we
> are the academy” is more than a little frustrating to scholars who would
> wish to use better publication models but do not wish to become martyrs.
>
> --
> Prof. Dr. Tara L Andrews
> Digital Humanities, Universität Bern
> http://www.dh.unibe.ch/
>
> On 03 Aug 2015, at 17:59, Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
>
> "The academy" we are us. I parse this to mean that authors submit to
> commercials because they, the authors, don't take noncommercial venues
> seriously. Do I misunderstand? What would change that?
>
> On Monday, August 3, 2015, David Meadows <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> the answer is the same as it ever was... the perception (real or imagined)
>> that the academy doesn't take noncommercial publishing venues seriously
>>
>> Sent from TypeMail
>>
>> On Aug 3, 2015, at 5:29 PM, Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> In Greg Crane's latest essay
>>>
>>> (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nSt2V7Bt1weVSAMjiDQw-d-Rg2DivZSyI12g3Xxq8tY/edit),
>>> he says:
>>>
>>> "But allowing commercial publishers to sell academic work no longer
>>> constitutes the best mechanism for disseminating academic content."
>>>
>>> If that is indeed true, how do we explain the phenomenon that the vast
>>> majority of scholars and scientists still choose, each time they have
>>> a piece of their best work ready for dissemination, to use
>>> 'commercial' (this term includes not-for-profit publishers such as
>>> university presses and learned societies) publishers? One consequence
>>> of these choices is that when Research Councils UK disseminated 10M
>>> GBP to support article processing charges to ensure open access, the
>>> largest beneficiaries were Elsevier and Wiley (about 2M each).
>>>
>>> Jim O'Donnell (open access
>>> publisher since 1990)
>>> Arizona State University
>
>
>
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