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Thanks for the link - that is very helpful to me! Best wishes, Suzanne -- Suzanne Newcombe, PhD Reviews Editor, Religions of South Asia Inform Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE [log in to unmask] (+44)20 7955 7654 www.lse.ac.uk/collections/INFORM Please note: Inform takes every care to provide as accurate and balanced an account as possible, but we welcome corrections and comments. On 18 Mar 2012, at 14:07, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote: > > > INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HINDU STUDIES : FREE ARTICLES > > The most downloaded articles are being offered free. > > > Plus Open Access publishing scheme > > > Scholars are also given the choice to have their articles available free to the public for the prize of a fee to be paid by the scholar > > $3,000 > or > 2, 000 Euro > > Provisions are also made for scholars whose work is funded by the public institution grants of the US National Institute of Health, a condition of which is that " you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal articles in PubMed Central and ensure their free availability (open access) within 12 months of publication." > > > These open access initiatives need to be seen in relation to slow but seemingly definite shifts ion the world of scholarship that challenges journal publisher's control over work produced by scholars and for which scholars are not paid any money by the publishers while publishers gain money from these works, along with being accused of exploitative pricing and marketing schemes for journal access, schemes that prove challenging even for institutions, lock out non-institutional scholars and students as well as prove particularly challenging for scholars and students from outside rich countries, although some journal publishers and archivists like JSTOR are working to improve access to subscribers from outside rich nations, providing highly reduced pricing schemes for such customers. > > Academic journal articles and academic books are, to me, often the best written sources of information on the subjects they address, on account of the high standards of the Western academic establishment which has become the global standard in the wake of European imperialism and increasing adoption of Western cultural models even by most, if not all countries. What the Western educational system might lack in inclusiveness in relation to the variety of metaphysical and epistemological approaches represented by the scope of such perspectives from other civilizations, it makes up for through intellectual rigour, breadth of subject matter spanning the globe and capacity for accommodating, in one institution or other, every conceivable subject, all of which are admissible into its rubric as long as they are studied in terms of the principles of intellectual rigour that are its benchmark, as well as a self renewing readiness, within institutional contexts, to reexamine its own foundational perspectives, as represented, for example by the revisionary influence of Post-Modernism and the more recent developments in interdisciplinarity, which reexamine standard conceptions of expertise and disciplinary structure, such as demonstrated by the introduction and perhaps the essays in the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. > > These qualities, along with the flood of knowledge constantly churned out by Western publishers and publishers in other regions adapting their techniques, as in India, the knowledge system represented by Western scholarship and any adaptations from that standard model effectively controls access to the most sophisticated bodies of knowledge. The open access to knowledge generally enabled by the Internet is priceless, but the most thoroughly filtered and processed information, capable of redevelopment in terms of numerous possibilities, is often not freely available online because it is behind the walls of academic journal database and inside academic books, which often cost more than trade books. Open access publishing is challenging this model, since quite a few open access journals exist and some academic books are freely available online, along with such an excellent scientific article database as arXiv.org, providing "Open access to 742,795 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics", a significant number of which seem to be articles already published in various journals, along with academia.edu, an online space where institutionally affiliated and non-affiliated scholars can freely archive and share their research, but I wonder how representative these initiatives are. > > thanks > > toyin > > Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://lse.ac.uk/emailDisclaimer