Justus and others,
Open-access is becoming easier and easier with software like the Open Journal System (which S&S will start using quite soon), however money and time are problems. S&S's initial funding came from a Newcastle University grant, and the labour was provided for in my postdoc fellowship a few years ago. But pure volunteer labour can't be relied on forever (especially not mine - now i have a 'proper job' I have to do this in my 'spare time' such as it is). So in order to keep ourselves going, Surveillance & Society has just set up a registered charity, the Surveillance Studies Network, to own and run the journal. We'll derive income from voluntary donations and the running of conferences. We reckon that we should be able to generate not just enough money to secure the future of the journal but even to do things like give out occasional seed funding for new projects by early career researchers etc. This probably works okay for journals like S&S which almost define their own domain, but is more difficult for journals in areas with established academic associations.
The other thing of course is for such journals to band together. The Directory of Open Access Journals and other projects have done something, but there hasn't yet been a significantly powerful collective effort from open-access journals. I'd like to see that happening. I don't know if ACME, Agora and other are interested and have any ideas on this.
David.
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers on behalf of Justus Uitermark
Sent: Mon 12/11/2007 20:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Paying for academic journals
hi,
I agree that the long-term solution would be open-access journals managed by independent editorial collectives. Although it would now take a lot of effort to wrest the journals from the publishers, it seems to me that, in principle, it is not so very difficult to work as independent collectives. Together with a number of other people I have been running an independent Dutch journal (Agora) for years now. In spite of the rapid changes in the composition of the editorial board, it proved possible to keep the entire process in our own hands. One precondition for success is that a university is willing to put some money into it but this is peanuts compared to what libraries now spend on journal subscriptions.
An intermediate solution may be that academic or professional associations publish the journals. But unfortunately the actual development goes in the opposite direction: associations have gradually outsourced their publication activities. Although editorial boards retain a measure of control, I think this is a worrying development. Journals like Ijurr or Antipode should in my view not run the risk of becoming dependent upon publishers like Blackwell. Of course the cooperation between these journals and this publisher is very good (at least it seems so from a distance) but I always feel weird when I hear that a publisher 'sponsors' a lecture or a lunch - after successfully extracting money from the publishing process, the products of this labour come back as generous gifts. More fundamentally, once a publisher is involved, a journal always runs the risk that it has to fight about pricing or other policies (see Political Geography). I don't know if Antipode and Ijurr made agreements about price increases but I think they at some point will be told that they need to conform to the publisher's policy.
In short, I think it is a shame that there is no professionally controlled non-profit company (like a university press) that keeps controls the publishing process.
It is partly for these reasons that I just publish my own articles on my website. I think it would be outrageous if a publisher would claim that it has copyright over a paper to which it contributed very little. I also expect that the reasonable people at the publishers realize that they would be wise not toe sue people for publishing their own papers on their websites if they want to continue to use the labour power of those same people. Of course this strategy of 'just do it' would be more effective if all would do it.
best wishes
Justus
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers on behalf of D'Arcus, Bruce Dr.
Sent: Mon 12/11/2007 20:46
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Paying for academic journals
Deb (Gmail) wrote:
...
> i would also recommend (at the cost of offending journal and book publishers)
> putting your own publications online - either on your own website or through
> this website (http://www.scribd.com/) i recently discovered (and downloaded a
> useful publication from).....
Here's the sad irony though: we don't typically own the rights to the work we publish. So more than a question of "offending" the publishers by making PDFs freely available, it seems likely to me that in their eyes we'd be breaking the law?
If my hunch is wrong, someone please correct me.
The long term solution to this problem is open access journals, and perhaps even more informal publishing of academic work (maybe self-publishing?). But then that gets us back to the problem of the reward structure of the academy.
Bruce
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