Friends,
Steffen Boehm asks,
"Why are there still less than a handful of open-source/open-access
journals out there that serve the CMS community?"
There are many obvious reasons, and some that may be less obvious.
Among the obvious reasons:
On the publishing side, creating and maintaining a publishing
program involves extensive costs in time. Having been a publisher
and editor, I am aware that only part of these costs involve physical
production. An enormous amount of effort is required simply to
develop and maintain the content. Relatively few wish to do this,
not in comparison with the many other things we might be doing
with our time.
What a journal or book press does on the publishing side soon
touches on the potential a journal represents to authors.
For example, effective publishing requires rendering a journal
visible -- and this includes the immaterial aspects of impact such as
abstracting, applying for ISI coverage, etc. I note, for example, that
even a fine journal such as Ephemera does not bother to make itself
visible outside a rather small circle. Since abstracting and coverage
in ISI are one aspect of generating visibility, it also affects whether
most scholars can (or wish to) offer articles to journals that do not
or cannot maintain effective support services.
To some degree, we scholars are paid to publish. Even those of us
who have great freedom in choosing what we will write about and
how we will write are limited in our choice of outlets by the realities
of academic publishing.
In Norway, for example, universities and university-level professional
schools receive their basic research funding based on a point system.
Articles in "level 1" journals receive a point. Articles in a smaller
group of "level 2" journals are worth 3 points. There are nearly
14,000 level 1 journals covering nearly all fields, and nearly 1,800
level 2 journals. Journals are added to the list when scholars nominate
them, so the fields are well represented. If a journal is not interesting
enough to scholars to win a few nominations, it is not reasonable
for a scholar to publish in that journal -- in great part because it
disadvantages his or her school.
Even more points accrue to book chapters and monographs published
by some 600 level 1 book publishers and roughly 90 level 2 book
publishers. These amounts of money become genuinely significant:
a monograph with a level 2 publisher can be worth a year's salary
to the school that employs the author.
On the one hand, I understand and support the argument against
the inward-looking publishing complexes that effectively take our
research and sell it back to our schools.
On the other, I understand the work that goes into professional
publishing. I don't want to do it -- it's a real pain. But I do want
a publisher who does provide the appropriate marketing and
attention infrastructure for what I write.
So far, few open access journals or publishers do so.
In writing these words, I want to note that I serve on the advisory
boards of an open access journal at Athabasca University Press
(Canada's Open University), as well as on the boards of journals
published by more standard publishers (including Elsevier). I agree
with the principle of open access, but I recognize that if open
access is to become effective, we must also bring about an
open access system that is as well organized and as effective as
the old, closed system.
Only a few journals have done this, and to do so, they have had
the support of major funding.
The answer to Steffen's question is, in part, that the dearth of
open-access journals is related both to author preferences -- and to
the cost in time and effort of creating an open-access journal that
serves enough author needs to attract authors.
I have always been heterodox in my choice of journals -- and like
many others on this list, I have an odd publishing profile for a
management scholar. But my choices are always guided to some
degree by the national system, and so far, few open access journals
have done the work needed to get on the lists.
Given Norway's politics, and given the nature of academic politics
in Norway, I can say this has more to do with whether the journals
take on the responsibility of generating visibility than it has do either
with the fact that they are open-access or radical.
--
Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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