On Rejecting Journals: A soft boycott of closed-access journals may be a more effective way to re-align resources. | Impact of Social Sciences

"Yesterday, in an act of minimal defiance, I declined a request for peer review on the grounds that the journal was owned by Taylor and Francis, and therefore charges authors £1,788 per piece for open access, or imposes an 18 month restriction on repository versions. In the wake of the OA debate, this situation seems increasingly ludicrous: for the short term at least, an increase in journal profit streams, made possible by the sanctity of unpaid academic input. The principle (saying no to closed journal peer review) is not inviolable, but a reluctance to subsidise shareholders with free labour seemed an appropriate response to the current balance of forces ... The most forceful of open access advocates would point out at this stage that the answer to this dilemma is pretty straightforward: don’t review for closes access journals and don’t publish in them. Simply move your labour – writing, reviewing, editorial board-ing – as quickly as possible to the more open journals. The more of us who do that, the quicker the transition to proper open access will be. This is true, but it won’t quite do. For two reasons.  First, whatever is to be wished for, the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences currently lack open access journals prestigious enough to make submission to them a low cost option in the economy of reputation. This is a corollary of the market dominance enjoyed by closed journals: scholars are penalised if they step outside of this reputational system.  Second, and more crucially, journals are not just empty vessels, and are not interchangeable in content, editorial policy or audience. This is perhaps more so for disciplines where articles do other than report the results of an experiment. Scientists may struggle to understand this (and are predisposed to diagnose it as an intellectual failing) but pieces in, say, international political theory, are interventions of a kind that will not be equally welcomed regardless of a journal’s Editorial Board or publication history. More bizarrely still, that this is not a function of bad faith or mendacity on the parts of Editors (even if that may sometimes be the case), but is a feature of the subject matter itself. Reasonable people, in other words, disagree. The variety of journals is thus both an example of‘camp structure’ to be bemoaned, but also a guarantee of plurality. There is an element here of self-fulfilling prophecy, since journals with a reputation for hostility towards particular sub-fields will get less of those submissions, and policies may be more open than is often assumed.  But there is still a difference in journal audiences, and this cannot be dismissed merely by proposing a super-repository (although that would certainly help). The desire to be read in a certain tradition, and in the wake of particular historical arguments, is not unreasonable. The same piece will simply not be seen by the same colleagues (or publics) in International Security as it would be in Millennium as it would be in Signs as it would be in Political Geography, and so on ... Those might alone be good reasons to doubt the efficacy of a Costs of Knowledge-type boycott of closed journals (and, worse, many will not embrace a boycott out of straight-forward cowardice). But if we do want to initiate some kind of movement at least, a more subtle strategy might be to slowly re-align resources towards the least-bad-offenders and make clear our reasons when doing so. Cambridge University Press, for example, seem to be the best closed journal host, Sage somewhere in the middle, and Taylor and Francis and Elsevier the worst when it comes to openness. So publish with the best wherever possible, always turn down the worst for peer review, and help out more radical initiatives whenever it is in your power. And try and keep yourself honest in your judgements. Commit to a soft boycott, if you will ..."