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Social and economic change rarely occurs uncontested. The publishers started their fightback quite some time ago. There is intense lobbying at national and supranational levels of governance. Even in those countries where governments have stated policy on this (in the UK the stated policy objective is that all publicly funded research outputs should be freely available to the public via the internet) the inertia of the system is playing into the hands of the publishers and other elements of the status quo. Who knows when the objective of freely available research will eventuate? Regards Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [log in to unmask] www.eca.ac.uk [log in to unmask] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 05:58:02 +0100 To: <[log in to unmask]> Subject: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] New Models of Academic Publishing Friends, Sean's got it exactly right. Half a decade back, the debate seemed to be whether we could accept these other models. Today, the debate seems to be whether the for-pay publishers will survive in the new era of open access publishing. The emergence of serious OA journals and publishers is accelerating, and for-pay publishers must accomodate them by adding value and allowing for different kinds of exchange that were unthinkable only a few years back. It's been a while since I studied the figures, but the worldwide academic publishing industry is a multi-billion dollar indutry. What is astonishing is that universities and research organizations pay us to do the research and writing. Then they pay us to do the reviewing and editing. After this investment, we transfer our copyright to publishers who sell back to us at high cost the content we pay for, create, and give them. Most institutions are thinking this through carefully. These economics made sense in the era of lead type, print on paper, and mailed subscriptions. We paid for the services that publishers provided when printing presses were dear and publishing was a costly process followed by the difficulties of distribution. For any number of reasons, nearly everyone is thinking twice. There have been rich discussions among librarians, university heads, university presses, and others on these topics -- along with discussions by scholars in every field. The change is nearly upon us. I'd suspect that everyone is ready for it. It's more a matter of ironing out details than principles. In my faculty, what counts is the quality of the journal, not whether it appears on paper. The publisher matters to some degree, but good new OA publishers are far better respected than low-quality paper mills. Best regards, Ken On Wed, 7 May 2008 08:54:52 +1000, Sean Cubitt <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >I'm just writing part of a faculty briefing for our university's information >futures policy and tracking some of the developments here. OHP is a >tremendous leap - and with both vectors and Fibreculture squarely in the >CRUMB field. The idea of a double layer of quality assurance shd mean we can >persuade both colleagues and research councils etc to recognise online >journals as major sites equivalent to the hardcopy journals. A/c an EC >report, Science technology medecine publishing is worth between 7 and 11 bn >USD and prices have been rising at between 200 and 300 per cent of inflation Ken Friedman Professor, Ph.D., Dr.Sci. (hc), FDRS Dean, Swinburne Design Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia +61 3 92.14.64.49 Telephone Swinburne +61 404 830 462 Mobile email: [log in to unmask]