Dear all,
Joel Wainwright and I recently wrote and published a 2-page Geoforum editorial about the need to divest from Elsevier en the corporate publishing model that might be of interest to members on the list, building on and inspired by the German 'Projekt Deal': https://brambuscher.com/2017/12/13/from-a-new-deal-to-projekt-deal-time-for-solidarity-with-german-scholars/
The commercial scientific publishing model is broken. The basic problem is simple. We scholars give the products of our labour our research papers, reviews, and so forth - for free to for-profit corporations. These corporations then sell the same products of our labour back to us, via libraries. This arrangement might be acceptable if the publishing industry charged only modest fees or contributed some fundamental quality to the work. But they do neither. No matter how much they say they care about knowledge, their main priority is - as with any for-profit corporation - maximizing returns for private investors. In pursuing this goal, they employ creative means to extract resources from the public purse to pay for exorbitant journal fees - funds that otherwise could be invested in public research and education. In the process, the publishing corporations intensify a perverse focus on impact factors, citation counts, 'clickbait' articles and academic branding, rather than genuine engagement. All this degrades the quality of academic work and serves to undermine the conditions in which many of us work.
The whole text: https://brambuscher.com/2017/12/13/from-a-new-deal-to-projekt-deal-time-for-solidarity-with-german-scholars/
--------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Bram Büscher
Professor and chair, sociology of development and change, Wageningen University
Visiting Professor, Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies - University of Johannesburg
Research Associate, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University
De Leeuwenborch, Hollandseweg 1, 6707 KN Wageningen, Netherlands.
T: +31317482015 E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>.
I: http://brambuscher.com<http://brambuscher.com/> / http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Expertise-Services/Chair-groups/Social-Sciences/sdc.htm
Senior editor Conservation & Society: please consider submitting a paper! See: http://www.conservationandsociety.org/<http://www.conservationandsociety.org./>
For recent publications, see: https://brambuscher.com/publications/
[WageningenUR logo]
|