In computer science, many of the major publications have gone open access. So it can be done.

I seem to recall – from a committee meeting years ago – that, relative to other departments, computer science departments spent less on buying books and more on employing librarians. The reason for this was said to be that CS technical reports were often free or sold at the margin cost of printing.

In some ways, open access proceedings on the Internet is a continuation of a long-standing tradition of free tech reports.

Incidentally, it’s good to see that some people don’t just see open access as meaning “making it easy for them to listen to us.”

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/1425247
(sorry, link not working)

Linked in previous, DE Knuth, one of the luminaries of computer science

I rather worry that we are patronising the Southern scholars by assuming that our Euro/American/Atlantic-centric research that universalises our social/political conditions to the whole of the world using methodologies that are problematic (and some that are not) are actually relevant and useful to the rest of the world.

I work in a field (postcolonial literature) which is in some sense about the global south, so the question of who is published in the major journals is all the more intense. Unfortunately, when I’ve been asked to review articles written by scholars based at universities in India and Pakistan, I have usually had to turn them down. The vast majority of published essays in postcolonial studies journals are written by people with some credentials at western universities, even if they sometimes also have an earlier connection to a university in the global south.

If we can’t solve this problem in the short run, one way to alleviate some of the assymetry in access to information is to contribute condensed versions of our “findings,” as well as other kinds of specialized knowledge, to Wikipedia.

Why not fund OA through a huge consortial effort by universities and colleges in the U.S.? That strikes me as wholly sufficient to pay for its costs, and dispense with any kind of fee assessed at the time of access or publication.

This then removes any need for a complicated publisher-side agreement for discounts by taking the publisher out of the picture altogether. Which, in the case of most academic research in short-form publication, strikes me as wholly appropriate. Most of the productive labor and costs involved in producing scholarly knowledge are already paid out by the universities themselves anyway.
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Laleh: Call me crazy, but I think it would be nice to wait and see what intellectuals and scholars in “the South” actually do or do not find interesting and valid if and when scholarly publication circulates freely. It’s kind of presumptuous to decide in advance what might happen.