"A couple of years ago, my fellow Chef Kent Anderson responded (quite strongly) in this forum to an opinion piece by George Monbiot in which Monbiot characterized academic publishers as 'the most ruthless capitalists in the western world' and as 'parasitic overlords' and called for scholars to 'liberate the research that belongs to us.' Kent’s response, for its part, characterized Monbiot’s piece as a 'rant' and as 'uninformed, unhinged, and unfair.' As one might imagine, his posting generated a very long and sometimes fascinating comment stream.
Fast-forward to last month, when I wrote a post about what I believe to be 'signal distortions' contributing to a very weird set of economic dynamics in the scholarly publishing industry. At the end of that piece I mentioned that there are some who would clearly welcome the 'taking back' of scholarly publishing by the academy, and I promised to share thoughts about that. (For the rest of this post, the phrase 'scholarly publishing' should be understood to refer mainly to scholarly journal publishing. The academy already competes directly with commercial publishers in the book realm.)
The question I’d like to address here is not whether we in the academy should “take back publishing” from the commercial scholarly publishers, but rather what the options for doing so might be, and whether any of those options seems feasible at the moment (whether or not desirable).
In considering this possibility, it seems to me that the first question we need to address is: would academia take back scholarly publishing by competing with traditional publishers (i.e. doing it better than publishers do it) or would we actually exclude commercial publishers from operating in the academic marketplace—saying, in essence, that there is no longer a legitimate marketplace for commercial publishing of academic work (i.e. doing it instead of letting publishers do it)?
Doing It Better: Replicate or Forego
The competitive approach is, I believe, a real option. Scholarly publishing based in libraries or in university departments or colleges would not have to look exactly like traditional publishing, as long as it continues to provide authors those services that they demonstrably value (review, editing, certification, dissemination, and archiving) as well as the things that readers demonstrably value (quality signaling and access). A non-commercial, academically-based system could succeed as long as authors and readers both feel that it does all of those things, and does them as well as traditional publishing does.
This road would itself require us to choose between two general strategies: either replicate all of the value-adds currently offered by traditional publishers (while perhaps adding some new ones as well), or decide to forego some of them—either because we don’t actually agree that they provide value, or because we don’t feel the value they provide is worth the cost ...
Doing It Instead: The Coercive Option ... The exclusion option would be difficult if not impossible. To prohibit firms from participating commercially in the scholarly-communication economy would require either that all scholars and scholarly institutions independently reach the same decision not to participate in commercial scholarly publishing (not terribly likely) or that they agree among themselves to unite to keep commercial publishers out of the system (which is also extremely unlikely and could constitute illegal collusion).Another path to the exclusion option would be for government to legislate it. The law could theoretically prohibit commercial publishers from being involved in scholarly communication, though such legislation would probably have to apply only to works based on publicly-funded scholarship. The emergence of such legal restriction seems unlikely for a variety of reasons ... The Real Monopolists ... When Monbiot bemoaned the 'knowledge monopoly' as 'unwarranted and anachronistic,' he was objecting—whether he knew it or not—to a system in which monopoly control is enjoyed first of all by the author. The current system is one in which authors generally trade monopoly control of their work for the prestige and added value that come from formal publication. Excluding commercial publishers from the academic marketplace would mean taking away the scholar’s right to decide where he or she will publish. Scholars tend not to support systems that take away that right, which is why so many institutional OA policies are not mandates in fact, but rather statements of organizational preference. Funder mandates have more coercive power, of course, and represent a third option that seems slowly to be gaining ground. But mandates such as those put in place at the NIH and other federal granting agencies do not represent any transfer of power or control to the academy—in fact, just the opposite ... The Real Barrier ... If we take it as given that of the three options outlined above—replicating, foregoing, and excluding—the one most likely to be acc