Robert Samuel, Shedding light on academic press, The Duke Chronicle, October 20, 2004. How rising journal prices force libraries to buy fewer books, and how this harms scholars in the humanities. Excerpt: "In the meantime, there are some ideas for lowering journal costs. One popular concept is 'open-access' publishing, which is part of the ideology that knowledge created by universities should be available for all to access. While many other science publications are owned by corporate conglomerates that can drive up costs, 'open-access' publishers do not seek profit; this is similar to how monographs are published in the university press system, where profits are a luxury rather than a goal. '[Open publication] is getting a lot of publicity because it basically puts the cost of publishing on the submitter of the paper,' the libraries' [Deborah] Jakubs said. 'There's a lot of debate about open access. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t get two or three articles saying "open access is good," "open access is bad." '...Publishing monographs on the Internet is not yet a serious alternative, but that has not stopped some junior faculty from experimenting with the boundaries of the World Wide Web. Assistant Professor of English Matt Cohen is following the normal route of working for tenure as he researches and writes a monograph. At the same time, Cohen is one of several scholars laboring to archive the works of Walt Whitman on the Internet, a project he views as indicative of the future of academic publishing."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/20/2004 08:32:00 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.
