Free Science Blog | A Spectre is Haunting Academic Publishing

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-08-21

Summary:

"... Scenario One: Continuity It is possible (though not very likely) that the situation will remain as it is in 2014: Our journal papers and books will be published by commercial publishers like De Gruyter, Benjamins and Brill, or by academic publishers like Oxford University Press or MIT Press. Our libraries will subscribe to these journals and buy paper copies of the books, but at the same time many of us will make copies of these available on our websites or on social-publication platforms like Academia.edu and ResearchGate, or on subfield-specific archives like LingBuzz. The reason why this is not likely to continue is that the trend for self-archiving (e.g. on Academia.edu) has been growing strongly in recent years, especially among younger linguists ... Scenario Two: Scholar-owned platinum publishing ... Another scenario is that publication will increasingly be in the hands of the scholars themselves, just as it was in the 19th century, when most research papers were published by the learned societies, and they only subcontracted printers to produce the physical issues and volumes ... As a result, there is now an ever increasing list of journals that are produced by the scholars and their institutions out of their usual budgets, without charging either the authors or requiring the readers to subscribe to them. This is called “platinum publishing” here. Some examples of platinum linguistics journals are ... Scenario Three: Author fees collected by global companies ... But the platinum journals do not have the same prestige as the traditional journals yet, and the traditional journals are mostly owned by global companies such as Elsevier (e.g.Lingua), Springer (e.g. NLLT), Cambridge (e.g. Journal of Linguistics), Wiley (e.g.Language & Linguistics Compass), and Taylor & Francis (e.g. Australian Journal of Linguistics). Smaller companies such as De Gruyter or Benjamins are either striving to become global companies or are candidates for being bought up by the bigger companies ..."

Link:

http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.linguistics oa.prestige oa.universities oa.colleges oa.gold oa.fees oa.definitions oa.ir oa.green oa.publishing oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.no-fee oa.repositories oa.hei oa.journals oa.ssh

Date tagged:

08/21/2014, 08:06

Date published:

08/21/2014, 04:06