Let’s Start Talking about Open Access

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-16

Summary:

"I don’t write much about academia here, and perhaps I should start. As many know, all is not entirely well in American academia, especially in the humanities. Budget cuts, the increasing use of massive open online courses, the perils of publishing, the strangeness and delights of academic culture, the dearth of tenure track employment, the persistent political attack on college professors and how they do their job, and a general misunderstanding about academic labor demand more attention. True, many people already address these issues far more cogently that I could . . . but news that Aaron Swartz committed suicide hit me. We academics rarely think about our work as a commodity, the mechanisms through which the public is denied access, and the profits corporations make by selling that access to mostly cash strapped public universities at exorbitant prices. But Swartz’s death is an indication that academic work is a high stakes game that can leave many of us with blood on our hands...  For this alleged 'crime' Swartz was looking at a maximum of $4 million in fines and up to 50 years in prison. The great irony is that a few days ago JSTOR announced the release of 1,200 containing more that 4.5 million academic articles to the public for free.  I won’t go into the details of the problems with the economics of JSTOR and other academic databases, their role as gatekeepers of knowledge, and academic labor. Sarah Kendzior did an excellent job of that six months ago.  My personal concern besides the fact that a young man has committed suicide (which Swartz’s family says was directly connected the US Attorney’s office aggressive pursuit of this case), is that two professional organizations I belong to, the American Historical Association and the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, both house their journals with JSTOR, not to mention all of the major journals covering the Eurasian region are part of either JSTOR, Project Muse (both non-profit), Wiley Online, , Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, (all for profit) and others. These include theSlavic Review, Kritika, Europe-Asia Studies, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavic and East European Journal, the Russian Review, the Slavonic and East European Review, Cahiers du Monde russe, as well as many, many others covering history, literature and languages, sociology, political science, anthropology, geography, economics, and their sub-fields and disciplines.  I know it’s too much to ask for the AHA and ASEEES or the scholars who run these journals (often with little to no compensation) reconsider their relationship with subscription based academic online databases. I would ask, however, that in light of Aaron Swartz’s death my many colleagues begin a serious conversation about our intellectual property, the labor that produces it, its commodification, and distribution..."

Link:

http://seansrussiablog.org/2013/01/13/lets-start-talking-about-open-access/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.societies oa.history oa.databases oa.aha oa.jstor oa.asees oa.ssh oa.humanities

Date tagged:

01/16/2013, 11:32

Date published:

01/16/2013, 06:32