It's good to see linguistic diversity appearing in the journal world. The expensive-access journals apopear to be mainly English-language. Is this a Supply & Demand situation, because,until now at least, English has been the lingua franca of much of academia, despite the rise of universities in non-Anglophone countries (of course it wasn't always English; once French, and before that Latin - try writing about GIS in Latin!!).
The imbalance between the % of Anglophone journals in the pay-sphere and the free-sphere highlights a background issue that has been less-discussed here, which might be called "The Rise of the Administrator". If that sounds like a horror film title, it ought to, because us academics have allowed, indeed connived and colluded, in permitting our careers to be highly metricised e.g. in terms of citations etc, in a way that earlier researchers would have found unrecognisable. How many papers did Isaac Newton,or Albert Einstein, produce per decade? I suspect they would have been un-REF-able, and maybe denied study leave, funding etc. (OK so Hiroshima would still have many pre-1945 buildings).
The rise of citation metrics, albeit a way of ensuring quality, has led to many distortions already mentioned on tjhis loist,e.g. parroting, also padding out author listings, and in the last RAE, severely disadvantaged new-ish journals, and those who published in them,because such journals had not been around long enough to build up a large citation factor. The current REF partially, but only partially, addresses these distortions.
So Anglophone journals are in excessive demand, because that is where you have to access, to cite and be cited, and so othyer language journals are held back whilst an artificially-expensive market is created for the Anglophone ones.
The Rise of the Administrator isn't easy to roll back, once in place, which it very surely is now (Parkinson, also Vance Packard, 'The Naked Society' written in the 1960s but all too relevant still today, say alot about this). Perhaps one way to restore the balance of power is indeed for academics to publish, BOTH in open access journals AND on their own websites. Each channel has different merits. The Open Access channel will promote journal-diversity, linguiostically and otherwise,...and own-website publishing will possibly create an altenative metric over which we have more control and is also more open to access, citation. Then academia can create its own quality assurance metrics - or do we want someone else to foist upon us their own system?
Dr Hillary Shaw
Food and Supply Chain Management Department
Harper Adams University College
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8NB
www.fooddeserts.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Heyman, Josiah M <[log in to unmask]>
To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 23:17
Subject: Re: More on Elsevier
No idea of the quality of these lists, but:
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=83 (geography)
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?cpid=124&func=subject (anthropology)
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?cpid=131&func=subject (sociology)
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=47&uiLanguage=en (political science; note: Journal of Political Ecology is here)
http://libguides.usc.edu/content.php?pid=22399&sid=447252 (urban and regional planning)
The English speaking world does not cover itself in glory on these.
There may be other librarians who have compiled such guides. They are strange little hobbits who like to do this sort of thing…please, a joke! I am praising librarians!
Joe Heyman
From: Mark Purcell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 15:59:48 -0700
To: Josiah Heyman <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: More on Elsevier
A little dream I am dreaming: is there any place with a more-or-less comprehensive list of open-access journals, at least those in geography (very broadly defined)?
It seems to me that while boycotting the for-profit world is good and even necessary, the real work of change has to do primarily with nourishing the open alternative so it can thrive...
On 2/6/2012 2:09 PM, Heyman, Josiah M wrote:
Another truly open access journal is Journal of Political Ecology, a topic that may interest some here.
http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/
Joe Heyman
From: Lawrence Berg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Lawrence Berg <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 13:33:29 -0700
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: More on Elsevier
Dear CGF members:
In response to the ongoing discussion about the knowledge enclosure occurring under capitalist academic publishers, it is important to note that there are alternatives to capitalist closed-access publishing other than mere individual publication of scholarly work on each of our own individual websites. There are in fact, collective responses we can engage in that are far more likely to be of success in contesting the enclosure of academic knowledge.
In this regard, I strongly encourage folks to consider submitting your work for publication in real open-access venues such as Surveillance and Society, Social Geography, and ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. These journals publish work without requiring authors to provide publication fees, and they do so in ways that maintain free access online.
In addition — and here is where the collective action comes in — I really encourage colleagues to consider starting open-access online journals and publishing venues.
Hopefully, some of the editors of other open-access journals will write in to tell us a bit about their scholarly reach and impact; I can speak a bit about ACME in order to give CGF members a sense of how open-access operates at present. Although the journal has been invited to become ranked by ISI, the ACME Editorial Collective has made a conscious decision to avoid hierarchical ranking systems like the ISI Impact Factor™. Notwithstanding this refusal to submit to ranking, we nonetheless have to submit an impact measure as part of our funding regime, and I can report that the journal has a very high impact factor (given our desire to NOT be ranked, I can report here only a rough description of our calculated IF: it was among the top half of the top 30% of Geography journals, as calculated using ISI’s IF formula). Perhaps more important than citation data are readership data. If we use downloads as a proxy for readership, then ACME has an excellent impact in terms of readers. Here are some data that give a sense of the journal’s extensive and broad readership:
ACME’s 12 articles published one week ago as Volume 10, issue 3, have already been downloaded 14,054 times;
ACME’s website was visited 24,365 times in the month of January 2012;
ACME’s website was visited 202,645 times in 2011 (and 216,351 times in 2010 — note we had some website problems in 2011);
ACME articles were downloaded 143,996 times in 2011;
ACME articles are on track for more than 185,000 downloads in 2012;
ACME articles are downloaded from computer ‘hosts’ located in more than 180 different national jurisdictions.
I expect that other open-access and online journals have similarly extensive levels of readership.
What’s interesting to me is how easy it has been to build such levels of readership, and this has implications for those who might wish to create an open-access journal. Visits to the ACME website, for example, have almost quadrupled (from 55,277 to 202,645) in the past five years. More importantly, most universities are happy to provide the services required to launch and support an open-access journal. UBC, for example, provides free server space and IT services for our website, and UBC has a number of specialist librarians focused on open-access publishing who help people us (and others) with copyright issues. ACME is published using the Creative Commons license, which protects the rights of authors, allows for free distribution (anyone can post an ACME article on their website providing they do so without changing the article in any way, they acknowledge the authorship and original publication in ACME, and they do so without commercial gain). The Open Knowledge Project (a collaboration of UBC, SFU and Uvic here in Canada) has created the Open Journal System to assist with hosting online and open access journals. This system, whilst a bit clunky, nevertheless provides support similar to that of Scholar One or Manuscript Central, including systems for tracking manuscripts and referees.
The biggest single resource that is needed for creating and operating an open-access journal is time. Right now, we give our labour free to capitalist publishing houses (after all, it is the state that pays for both my salary as a professor and for my research work through research grants), who thus capture 100% of the value from our labour (there is no ‘surplus’ labour here, as publishing houses capture the total value of all the labour we put into our research, editing, peer review, publication, etc.). Why not shift who/what we support with our scholarly labour; instead of giving it to capitalist corporations for free, why not give it back to ourselves through open-access publishing?
There are lots of us people in the open-access ‘movement’ who would be more than willing to help others get a journal up and running. Get in touch with editors at Surveillance and Society, Social Geography, or ACME... talk to your university librarian... Ask your Dean or other senior administrators for startup funds. There are lots of opportunities to make a difference in the world of academic knowledge production through open-access publishing.
In solidarity,
Lawrence
Lawrence D. Berg BA (dist.), MA, DPhil
Co-Director | Centre for Social, Spatial & Economic Justice
Community, Culture, & Global Studies | The University of British Columbia
Arts 368-368D | 1147 Research Rd. | Kelowna, BC, Canada, V1V 1V7
Phone +1 250 807 9392 | Fax +1 250 807 8001
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://web.ubc.ca/okanagan/ccgs/faculty/berg.html
Editor: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
http://www.acme-journal.org
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark Purcell
Associate Professor
Department of Urban Design & Planning
University of Washington
Gould 410, Box 355740
Seattle WA 98195
homepage: faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell
blog: pathtothepossible.wordpress.com/
253-987-6332
Fax: 206-6859597
