Open Access: A Response to Sean Guillory | Russian History Blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-16

Summary:

"My most recent blog post (on MOOCs) dealt with digital teaching. Less than a week after it appeared, Sean Guillory wrote an important piece on Sean’s Russia Blog regarding digital scholarship, to wit, the importance of open access for Russian historians. His inspiration for the piece was the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a gifted young computer scientist indicted by the government for downloading articles en masse from JSTOR with the intent to distribute them freely on the web. I do not know enough about Professor Swartz or about the case to comment further on it, and I am wary of quick declarations of the reasons behind particular suicides, but I think the question of open access is an important one. Sean deals with it carefully and intelligently, though I disagree with him on some points. The comments section of Sean’s blog piece includes several thoughtful responses written by Russian historians familiar with the economics of journal publishing and the labor it takes to produce a high-quality journal with rigorous peer review. I highly recommend that readers take a look at both the piece and the comments. Many of the commentators are editors with the big journals in our field, and I wouldn’t presume to add anything of substance from the journal side of the question. Instead, let me offer a few thoughts as an author, a consumer, and as someone involved in faculty governance at a small school. Guillory entitled his entry 'Let’s Start Talking About Open Access.' As Mark Steinberg gently pointed out in the comments, this is in fact a discussion that has been going on for some time. I’ve been thinking about it for several years, for more or less accidental reasons. Ten years ago, I was asked to be a faculty member on our library’s search for a digital resources librarian. Soon afterwards, I was appointed to the faculty library oversight committee, on which I served for two years. I subsequently served on the faculty committee that oversees the entire college budget.  As part of those experiences, I learned how libraries pay for digital resources, the intersection of library budgets with institutional budgets, and the ways that our librarians, at least, think about publication and public access. On our campus, our librarians are vigorous supporters of making scholarship available to as many readers as possible. As a result, our head of libraries has been the most enthusiastic initiator of the discussion regarding open access. A couple of years ago, he led the charge to create an open access policy for Lafayette faculty, and he and I have continued to correspond on access issues, including the disastrous Finch Report... This is a mind-numbingly foolish solution, as many British academics and the AHA have pointed out, but the Finch Report at least clarifies something that, occasionally, airy discussions about open access neglect: nothing is free ... Whenever you hear the word 'free' in any discussion on open access, you should substitute the word 'subsidized' ... The research for the articles is often underwritten by institutions of various sorts. Further, universities and colleges expect professors to be a part of a professional dialogue, and many of them include authoring journal articles and refereeing them as labor that falls under our job descriptions. Some, like my own institution, consider this work carefully when deciding upon merit raises. Others do not. But this doesn’t mean there is no subsidy, just that there is a massive free rider problem at play in any college or university faculty. Thought of more broadly (but not of course literally), we might say that society pays for part of the production of scholarly articles through block grants to professor salary pools rather than piece by piece..."

Link:

http://russianhistoryblog.org/2013/01/open-access-a-response-to-sean-guillory/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.policies oa.comment oa.green oa.universities oa.advocacy oa.societies oa.libraries oa.costs oa.librarians oa.prices oa.history oa.budgets oa.encouragement oa.colleges oa.jstor oa.project_muse oa.lafayette_college oa.repositories oa.hei oa.ssh oa.journals oa.humanities

Date tagged:

01/16/2013, 11:49

Date published:

01/16/2013, 06:49