Maybe have a radical new alternative method of publishing. Academics could open a website, and maybe also an Amazon account. Then publish our articles there, and maybe price some of them at £0.99 or whatever on Amazon. Meanwhile use the free-access website as a sort of blog on our ongoing research, and to advertise our Amazon articles, which at 99p or even £2.99 are slightly cheaper than the big journals would charge. And you can use colour graphics, etc which most journals hate publishing. Maybe even provide a few articles on the website free also? And for a small extra cost to the website owner you can see metrics on the popularity of your articles, just in case your HoD wants to see them?
Dr Hillary Shaw
www.fooddeserts.org
Hello all,
Regarding that point, and if I may be the annoying one in this plan, as early-career researchers if we "look down" on big publishers' journals we then look down on having jobs and other commodities such as homes and food, since the attribution of said jobs is for a big part dependent upon our capacity to publish in said journals. I say that while being favourable to the escape from this consortium, but this is the answer to "Why oh why critical social scientists keep publishing in those".
Now the advantage is that the persons in charge of setting the criteria for recruitment are our senior peers, although they are still constrained in their own ways I am sure. The first step is not the creation of independent journals, even though independent journals are necessary. The first step is the creation of a system which encourages people who participate to independent journals.
