@johnbramwell - what we are seeing in our 10+ years of research on this
topic in southern and central Europe is that the governmental and
institutional evaluation systems are increasingly rewarding (and in some
cases punishing if not) scholars for publishing articles in journals
that are included in the Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation
Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index--all published by
ThomsonReuters, and almost all of which are English-medium. This means
that de facto there is greater pressure to publish in English even if
that means that local audiences do not have access--either materially,
because of the high cost of subscriptions--or linguistically, to
research coming from their countries (this is assuming no bias against research from outside the 'center'
@BenWildavsky - Yes, but scholars located outside of the
Anglophone center tend to have less access to English-medium journals to
being with. Suresh Canagarajah, a professor at Penn State, has
documented how scholars around the world, because of limited
bibliographic and other material resources, often don't know of the full
range of journals in their topic areas. Policy makers in many locations
also don't seem aware of the complexities of how journals are included
in certain indexes, yet they use publishing in these indexes as criteria
for hiring, promotion, raises, grants, etc. So a scholar's choices may
be more limited in certain contexts and thus he/she may be more
acquiescent to this type of 'knowledge contouring'.
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I haven't seen any follow-up discussion of this debate that was published in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/2013/feb/13/english-language-international-higher-education?INTCMP=SRCH) but I found the two items above about almost
all scholarly publications being controlled by one company disturbing. I've had a recent discussion with a UK researcher with an active publication rate who said that there are basically three big publishers: Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer plus Cambridge, Oxford and the Nature group. All of these are pay-(dearly)-for-access. And additionally as MJC says in the second quotation policy makers and HE administrations in many places don't understand the complexities but use publishing in the indexes as benefit deciding criterion. she uses the phrase 'knowledge contouring' which is particularly chilling!
One might think that open access is a possible answer to this, but it's not without problems (an article on OA --- http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/phtoad/v65/i11/p22_s1?bypassSSO=1) because in many cases the author is required to pay to have his or her work published. from the same conversation i mention above, the researcher mentions that in the UK researchers are being required to publish in OA journals especially if their work was funded with public money which is fine if you have grant money to pay for it but not too fine if you have to pay for it out of your own funds.
What i'm wondering is why can't professional organizations / societies, in our case, TESOL, IATEFL, AAL, BAAL among others, have their own OA e-journals peer edited - as most are already on a voluntary basis. Why can't organization / professional society supported OA journals work and nullify / subvert the Big Three - or worse Big One publishers?
A perfect example of a successful OA journal is the TESL-EJ
(http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/)
I just remembered another example: WAC Clearinghouse OA books (http://wac.colostate.edu/books/) and their sustainable publishing initiative (http://wac.colostate.edu/sustain/)
I'm sure it's a complicated issue, but
perhaps an interesting/worthwhile topic of discussion?
Nancy Keranen
Benemèrita Universidad Autònoma de Puebla, Mexico
