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

[Christian Fuchs <christian.fuchs@uti.at>]

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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