Christian Fuchs on Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:25:17 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> some more nuanced thoughts on publishing, editing, reading, using


Am 7/27/11 12:38 PM, schrieb Gary Hall:

I'm not mentioning this as way of criticizing anyone's
strategic/tactical, political or ethical decisions - I merely want to
point out that these *are* decisions that we all make. For example, I
know some academics have taken the decision to stop giving their free
labour in the form of editorial work, peer-reviewing etc., to
non-public, non-open access, for-profit journals; or to  journals and
publishers who don't allow authors, as a bare minimum, to self-archive
the refereed and accepted final drafts of their publications in
institutional open access repositories; or who are owned by
multinational corporations involved, say, with the military or arms
trade; or who operate high annual library subscription charges.

Gary

Agreed that open access journals are very crucial for democratizing academia and need to be flourished...

But we should not forget the political economy of open access publishing. Having no big corporate publishing houses as supporters, open access journals risk being based on self-exploitative voluntary labour and to lack resources (and to become an alternative media-ghetto). I think engagement of scholars in such projects and submission of their articles to open access journals is an important start. But it is not enough, we also need special state funding of open access journal projects and requirements that projects funded by tax money need to publish their output in open access journals (there are no reasonable grounds why research funded by the public should end up being relatively locked from the public in corporate journals). In addition, it is still a fact that open access journals are much less indexed in citation databases like SSCI.

Best,
Christian Fuchs

--
Prof. Christian Fuchs
Chair in Media and Communication Studies
Department of Informatics and Media
Uppsala University
Kyrkogårdsgatan 10
Box 513
751 20 Uppsala
Sweden
christian.fuchs@im.uu.se
Tel +46 (0) 18 471 1019
http://fuchs.uti.at
http://www.im.uu.se
NetPolitics Blog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blog
Editor of tripleC - Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society: http://www.triple-c.se Book "Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies" (Routledge 2011)
Book "Internet and Society" (Paperback, Routledge 2010)


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