Cathy Davidson, Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2003. On the publishing crisis in the social sciences and humanities, which differs in interesting ways from that in the STM fields. Excerpt: "A sampling of essays written on this topic over the last three or four years makes it abundantly clear that what we do not need is more diagnoses of the problem. We've had lots of those: The problem is we have tied tenure to the publication of the book. No, journals are in trouble, too. It's the scholarly monograph itself. Or curtailed library budgets for humanities books. Price-gouging by commercial publishers of science journals, forcing libraries to spend less money on humanities and social-science publications...."
On October 2 at 1:00 pm ET, Davidson will participate in an online colloquy on the issues raised by her article. The colloquy, unlike the article, is accessible only to Chronicle subscribers. Users may submit questions ahead of time if they like. Here's how Chronicle describes the topic: "University presses are facing severe financial constraints. The cost of scientific journals keeps rising, making it more and more difficult for libraries to buy books and journals in the humanities and social sciences. Junior faculty members need to publish books to be promoted, but they can't find publishers for monographs. Professional organizations have begun to call on their members to tackle what they call the looming 'crisis in scholarly publishing.' What is to be done to deal with that crisis?" Cathy Davidson is the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies and a professor of English at Duke University.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/26/2003 10:00:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
