Academics are revolting: the open-access frontier | Overland literary journal

“... Authors and creators, keen to add the ‘value’ and prestige of a publisher to their work, or just excited that someone – anyone, is interested in publishing them, often give their work away with little thought of remuneration or what’s happening to their copyright.  Of course, publishers rightly argue they have the costs of editing, producing, advertising and distribution, not to mention the financial risks. It’s about adding value.  The rush to publish in ‘quality’ journals at any cost is particularly true of academic publishing... Check out what’s happening at Sydney University (and coming soon to a university near you), where a retrospective performance marker of four research publications in the last three years is being used as one criteria to cull the ‘non performing’.  Of course, academics, unlike your average author, generally have the benefit of an income that is independent of their publications. As Louise Adler pointed out in The Australian last year, authors and creators not publishing in academia are probably in more actual danger of perishing, given, ‘the average annual income of Australian writers has declined in the past decade from $23,000 to a character-building $11,000’...  In a recent appearance at the Sydney Writer’s Festival on a panel discussing the implications of theProtect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Jeff Jarvis stressed the need for authors to develop new business models. While this may be good advice, many authors, and academic authors in particular, risk becoming trapped in their existing arrangements, relying on proving their publication record in traditional formats.  But as the cost of academic journals rise, many are asking who benefits most from the current model? Philip Soos in a piece on The Conversation, ‘The Great Publishing Swindle’, argues that what was intended as a public good has become a publishing monopoly.  Danny Kingsley, also writing on The Conversation about the US Research Works Act – a Small Bill in the US, a Giant Impact for Research Worldwide – breaks it down like this: ‘Publicly funded research being undertaken by researchers who are often themselves (in Australia almost exclusively) also publicly funded, is written up and submitted to a publisher. The publisher sends it back out to the academic community to peer review the work, for no charge. Many of the editors of journals are also academics who again are doing the work gratis. The publisher then adds the journal design to the article and publishes it, charging disproportionally large subscription fees for access to the work. These fees are paid by university libraries, again, with public funding.’  And they are big fees. Each year university libraries pay millions of dollar to give scholars the right to access material that in the main has been provided by the same scholars, free of charge. Prices continue to increase while university budgets diminish and, as Adam Habib outlines, developing countries are priced out of the market.  While authors are using the internet to experiment with new ways to reach their audience, many academics are also revolting and choosing open-access publishing models that offer the same peer reviewed guarantee while allowing anyone who wants it, access to their work.  Take a look at this open-access.net clip for a really simple overview...  Unless you’re Kim.Dotcom making an estimated $175 million from alleged illegal filesharing, it’s unlikely you’ll find the FBI on your doorstep any time soon. I can’t help thinking, however, that we’ve been living in the digital equivalent of a frontier town, and sooner or later, for good or ill, the lawmen ride in and the frontier gets tamed.  Big Copyright has been slow to mobilise and grasp the monetary potential of the web, but it’s starting to lumber to its feet, and when it gets there you can be sure the 99% are going to be left hanging. The extensions of PIPA, SOPA and the Research Works Act to copyright e