This week I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute event at the University of North Carolina. It was a great event. I spoke about the Open Library of Humanities, had discussions about XML typesetting, positive representations of Sikhism and social challenges of changing scholarly communications.
Amid my travels this month I've been keeping an excited and close eye on the progress of Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto . This interest is both a matter of content and form.
This was a question that I received at a recent event where I spoke. Having set out the economic problems of the subscription model and the difficulties of cross-subsidy for learned societies, a questioner piped up: "We're a small learned society, charging £25 for our journal. We use the funds to give reductions to Ph.D. students and, when people want their articles to be openly available, we let them.
One of the biggest problems faced in the transition to a pure open access environment for journals is that learned societies have become dependent upon subscription revenue to subsidise their activities. This is not an a-historical phenomenon but has emerged most prominently since the 1960s when the societies outsourced their journal productions to either commercial publishers or to university presses.
As I've said before, including in my oral evidence to the UK House of Commons BIS Select Committee Inquiry into Open Access in 2013, non-disclosure agreements in academic publishing contracts are awful.
At a recent talk I gave, I was asked whether open access in the humanities is a "solution without a problem". Without wanting to disparage my questioner, I consider this to be a question born of institutional privilege and of conservatism. Firstly, I consider it a perspectivized take on the situation; just because one cannot see a problem does not mean that it doesn't exist, merely that it is invisible to that particular questioner.
Green open access refers to making academic, peer-reviewed research that has been published elsewhere (even subscription/sales venues) available for anyone to read freely on the internet by depositing the work in an institutional or subject repository. A large number of journal publishers allow this. Ideally, this is done without embargo. To protect revenue, however, often a publisher imposes a delay.
The extraction of use-value, exchange-value or surplus-value from academic research at sites distant from the university. Define: impact was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on September 06, 2014.
academia.edu is a "social network" for academics. Their latest design mirrors Facebook with its blue header and notification schema. When I saw Ben Lund speak about this at SCONUL, he implied that the outfit wants, in some ways, to disintermediate academic publishers.
In Althusser's Lesson , Jacques Rancière writes: "This reading of Marx via Althusser and Lacan does little more than give a new sheen to a thesis Kautsky had already defended: science belongs to intellectuals, and it is up to them to bring it to producers necessarily cut off from knowledge" Rancière, Jacques, Althusser’s Lesson, trans.
