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