Paper is more dependable than URLs, true, especially if kept inaccessible. (If made accessible, then it becomes more open to vandalism, theft, and bureaucratic fits of space-efficiency.) But an increasing number of schools rely on electronic-only subscriptions which are only good for the length of a contract. Having worked in what was once the second-largest computer company in the world and having seen many customers left in the lurch by corporations over the years, I have little faith in the stability of capitalist institutions. Even government funding is no guarantee—see the Reagan and Bush administrations.

The solution to URL impermanence is fairly simple: Allow mirroring. Even if one Gutenberg link goes down, others will be in place, and I don’t picture initiatives like the Internet Archive going away.

Whether I think we “can” and whether we “ought” to are two different questions. I did not assert that open-access journals are without their problems, nor that the author fees charged do not pose a significant difficulty. What I did say, and what I think stands, is that PLoS Medicine almost by itself demonstrates that an open-access “journal can be prestigious, publish important articles from top scholars, and subject those articles to extensive review.”

My central point is that I do not see any necessary link between closed-access and rigorous, scholarly journals. I certainly agree that because of the smaller wealth transfers typically available to academics in the humanities and social sciences, large author fees disproportionately impact this class. But this is also a function of the general devaluing of the humanities for sure and the social sciences to a greater or lesser extent.

As a graduate student in the (medical) humanities, I assure you, there are few who bemoan this undervaluation more than I. But this does not imply that there is any reason we (humanities scholars) should not strive to make academic discourse freely available to non-academics, nor that this goal is one that is inherently inconsistent with rigorous review and quality scholarship.

The model I want to emulate is one in which academics consciously strive to avoid the cloister. I see open-access journals as more consistent with this end.

PLoS has a hefty fee for authors. Do you think we can emulate that in the humanities and social sciences without writers tearing the throats out of editors for that?

ACM allows this. Out of curiosity which journals allow this. In my field (HCI) none of them do, though plenty of people ignore this.

(Obviously I wasn’t imagining that writers should have some automatic right to be published in academic journals.)

And why is that so obvious? That seems to be what freedom of speech is about – automatic right to make your ideas heard.

In principle, there is no reason why say, APSR, ISQ, or any number of journals could not publish on the web now with free access. Making sure that the information will remained safely archived—e.g., paper doesn’t get outmoded due to OS or interface changes—is another concern, but JSTOR for one has I think assuaged those concerns.

The main problem is practical, not on the academic side but on the finance side. Journal subscriptions are “club goods” to encourage association memberships, and library subscriptions (those onerous institutional fees) are a major revenue source. It is possible that advertising could make up for some of this, since there would be a broader audience, but not that much I imagine.

One compromise might be to locate the articles for various independent editorial boards at JSTOR, halve the institutional rates or come up with a bulk rate for all JSTORed journals, but only allow .edu IPs to access if they pay the fee, while allowing outside IPs get free access. So, at home, I access via my non .edu IP provider but to get through from my campus, the school must pay a fee.

Still, I don’t know what percentage of the institutional revenue stream goes back to associations now. Also, I don’t know how all journals fund editorial staff. Some editors get no stipend or pay; others get some subvention.

On the broader issue whether academic journals ought to be “for-pay,” I admit that learning about the medieval and Renaissance humanists has inculcuated in me a deep distaste for such closed access journals. The humanists were frustrated with the closed-off nature of Scholastic pedagogy. It’s no accident that the etymology of the word “cloistered” has roots in such pedagogy, as does the idiom “how many angels dance on the head of a pin.”

If academics wish to emulate the humanists in their insistence that erudition be applied to help everyday people cultivate virtue in their daily practices, it’s harder to justify keeping the fruits of that scholarship behind firewalls which virtually no one without institutional affiliation can access. Whatever its justifications—and I freely concede there are some—IMO it does not help redress the claim that academics typically tend to speak to themselves.

I’ve been following the discussion of Open-Access (OA) Publishing for about the past month or so, ever since Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of an OA mandate.

For any academics (or, anyone who is interested), I recommend joining the “American Scientist Open Access Forum” listserve, located at this site:

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

Based on my research thus far, there are no insurmountable impediments to open-access publishing—-there are plenty of ways to ensure quality control and peer review; there can still be maintained the “hierarchy” of journals within a discipline; there are plenty of ways to meet publishing costs by pushing costs to the front rather than to the end of the process; there are lots of cost-saving mechanisms for schools since they don’t have to pay for access to journals through JSTOR or Blackwell-Synergy; and it ensures access to research for everyone (academics, students, policy people, international students and academics). The real impediments seem to be that academics are very accustomed to paper publishing and, perhaps, some push-back from companies that make money from selling journal access to schools (I have not specifically researched this second issue, though, so it is only speculative).

If you’d like to see an example of what a recommended university OA mandate looks like, see Stevan Harnad’s comments (and recommend changes) at the end of this op-ed from the Harvard Crimson:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835

As I found through my own research, Stevan has done quite a bit of research and writing on this topic.

Okay, all best!
Josh