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I would love to see geographers adopt the arXiv format.  I've often wondered if it would be possible to talk the arXiv folks into expanding to other disciplines. I think the primary issue there is one of funding. (Or maybe no one has asked.)

But I think arXiv's proposed "business model" is generally right way to go. It boils down to "get libraries to cough up some money" (see: http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper).  I suspect that if university libraries could transition even 50% of what they spend on private journals into supporting open access journals and services like arXiv, you could destroy the dominance of the academic publishers inside of a decade, and save hundreds of millions of dollars to boot.

There are already open-source tools for managing the journal lifecycle (e.g. "Open Journal Systems" - http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs ), it's not a stretch to build on these existing resources.

it's difficult to imagine a system more archaic and ridiculous in the Internet age. (Well, maybe medical record systems, but how pathetic is that?)

The primary obstacle is not technical, or even necessarily financial, but cultural. Sadly, I've seen relatively little interest by Geographers in changing their own culture to help empower people through open access to knowledge (somewhat ironically when many of them are self-professed radicals).

Darrell


On Feb 16, 2012, at 08:14, Jonathan Cloke wrote:

It seems that Maths is ahead of us re the Elsevier matter plus more open refereeing proposals (see cross-post below); is anyone up for setting up a similar Google+ site for Geographers, or do we think that isn’t necessary?
 
This list should surely be at the forefront of a similar ‘Occupy Geography’ movement…
 
 
“The future of academic publishing
 
February 10, 2012, Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe (http://mathbabe.org/2012/02/10/the-future-of-academic-publishing/)
 
I’ve been talking a lot to mathematicians in the past few days about the future of mathematics publishing (partly because I gave a talk about Math in Business out at Northwestern).
 
It’s an exciting time, mathematicians seem really fed up with a particularly obnoxious Dutch publisher called Elsevier (tag line: “we charge this much because we can”), and a bunch of people have been boycotting them (http://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/elsevierstatementfinal.pdf), both for submissions (they refuse to submit papers to the journals Elsevier publishes) and for editing (they resign as editors or refuse offers). One such mathematician is my friend Jordan, for example.
 
Here’s a page that simply collects information about the boycott - http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform#The_cost_of_knowledge. As you can see by looking at it, there’s an absolutely exploding amount of conversation around this topic, and rightly so: the publishing system in academic math is ancient and completely outdated. For one thing, nobody I’ve talked to actually reads journals anymore, they all read preprints from arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), and so the only purpose publishers provide right now is a referee system, but then again the mathematicians themselves do the refereeing. So publishers are more like the organizers of refereeing than anything else.
 
What’s next? Some people are really excited to start something completely new (I talked about this a bit already here (http://mathbabe.org/2012/01/18/change-academic-publishing/) and here (http://mathbabe.org/2012/01/19/followup-change-academic-publishing/) but others just want the same referee system done without all the money going to publishers. I think it would be a great start, but who would do the organizing and get to choose the referees etc? It’s both lots of work and potentially lots of bias in an already opaque system. Maybe it’s time for some crowd-sourcing in reviewing? That’s also work to set up and could potentially be gamed (if you send all your friends online to review your newest paper for example).
 
We clearly need to discuss.
 
For example, here’s a post (http://occupypublishing.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/scientific-journals-in-e-publishing-age.html) hat tip Roger Witte) about using arXiv.org as a collector of papers and putting a referee system on top of it, which would be called arXiv-review.org. There’s an infant google+ discussion group (https://plus.google.com/113026609770667182181/posts) about what that referee system would look like.
 
Update: here’s another discussion taking place (http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Mathforge/Math2.0).
Are there other online discussions going on? Please comment if so, I’d like to know about them. I’m looking forward to what happens next!”
 
Jon
 
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer in Human Geography
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Leicestershire LE11 3TU

Room JJ 0.14
Phone 44 (0)1509 228193
 
“The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege
which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic
pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions
and no longer are; they merely have” - Paulo Freire.