Scholars must make their work more available and accessible (essay)

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-05-13

Summary:

“As a sociology graduate student, I sometimes feel like Simmel’s ‘stranger,’ close enough to academia to observe, but distant enough to retain an outside perspective. Like many graduate students staring down a possible academic career-path, I’m a bit terrified at the elephant in the room: Is what academics do really important? Are they relevant? Does it matter? Who reads a sociology journal? As my former theory teacher Chet Meeks once posed to my first social theory course, how many people look to sociology journals to learn anything about anything? While the occasional sociologist is quoted in The New York Times or appears on CNN, the influence these experts have is vanishingly small. I do not know as much about other disciplines, but my sense is that for most of the social sciences and humanities, expert knowledge is largely going to waste. To echo folks like Steven Sideman or danah boyd, we have an obligation to change this; academics have a responsibility to make their work relevant for the society they exist within. The good news is that the tools to counter this deficiency in academic relevance are here for the taking. Now we need the culture of academia to catch up. Simply, to become more relevant, academics need to make their ideas more accessible. There are two different, yet equally important, ways academics need to make their ideas accessible: I. Accessible by Availability PJ Rey argued that journals and their articles are the ‘dinosaurs’ of academia because ‘they wield enormous (and terrifying) power, yet they are ill-adapted to function in a changing environment.’ Print, and even digital, articles are said to be vestigial organs of a different time. However, I do think journal articles have a continuing and important role in intellectual discussions today and moving forward (a point Patricia Hill-Collins also made in reply to PJ’s pieceand one PJ agrees with). Not vestigial organs, journals remind me more of the process of exaptation, referring to the evolutionary process where something evolves in one environment for one purpose but comes to take on a new purpose in a different environment (feathers are the classic example of this co-optation). The 5,000 to 10,000-word, well researched, rigorously argued, highly edited, peer-reviewed and jargon-heavy format continues to have its place. Highly technical arguments need hashing out. However, the academic journal system as it currently exists is fundamentally broken. Most prestigious journals are ‘closed,’ locking articles down behind paywalls. This is one reason for academic irrelevancy. One of the reasons academic journals are closed is the expensive cost associated with print publishing. The Web radically changes the economy of information dissemination. Journals with all the same rigorous peer-review and editorial standards can exist online at a fraction of the cost of print journals without letting articles wilt away behind paywalls. Yesterday, print journals were created to facilitate the spread of information; today, the continued existence of print journals comes at a cost to the spread of information... Here’s an idea: if university libraries paid for every penny it would take to run the current crop of prestigious journals across all disciplines as Web-only-open-access and stopped buying them from publishers, those libraries would save a massive amount of money and all the articles could be available to all. This would save taxpayer and undergrad-tuition dollars and make academic research more available and therefore more relevant. Even if it would cost $100,000 a year to operate, say, the American Journal of Sociology as web-only and open-access, this could be paid for with a tiny fraction of the money libraries are collectively paying the The University of Chicago Press for this journal now. But this is only half of the availability fight. While top-tier journals should be made open access, open-access journals should also be made top-tier. Danah boyd wrote a terrific post covering much of this ground back in 2008, asking academics to boycott closed journals. She has also curated a good list of open-access publications. To second her call, academics need to prioritize reviewing for, citing from and publishing in open-access journals. Academics in positions of power need to consider intellectual availability in hiring and tenure decisions. Did this particular candidate attempt to make their ideas available for the public or did they participate in locking their ideas behind paywalls? Those in hiring and tenure positions should be demanding justification for why any particular candidate made their ideas and research inaccessible. II. Accessible by Design... The other half of the battle is for academics to express their insights, data and solutions in ways that are accessible... If I snapped my fingers and the American Journal of Sociology was completely open-access there probably would not be a massive rush of people scrambling to start downloading articles... As a fan of thinkers like Adorno or Hofstadter, I should confess that my first reac

Link:

http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/05/11/scholars-must-make-their-work-more-available-and-accessible-essay

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.societies oa.libraries oa.peer_review oa.impact oa.costs oa.quality oa.social_media oa.twitter oa.prestige oa.librarians oa.budgets oa.newspapers oa.sociology oa.blogs oa.journalism oa.journals oa.ssh

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

05/13/2012, 12:45

Date published:

05/13/2012, 12:46