Pull quote: “But three recent events and publications have me made more deeply aware of something I think scholarly authors are also beginning to discover—that the traditional commercial publishing model is actively harmful to the interests of good scholarship. Not just failing to keep up with changing conditions, but lagging behind in ways that threaten the quality and integrity of the scholarly enterprise itself.”
Pull quote: “The membership survey informed discussions and the final decision to invest resources in the online platform rather than sustain print.”
Pull quote: “To what extent has it been appropriate to sacrifice the short and long term good of patrons in the humanities for the short term good of not having to resist price increases or rethink journal packages that slowly squeeze monograph budgets to death? Are historians or literary scholars or musicologists less deserving because they’re not in the sciences? If so, why bother to offer PhDs in programs that aren’t adequately, or even fairly, supported by the library? If anything, humanists need library support more than scientists. For scientists, libraries hold the report of work done in a laboratory, but for humanists the library is the laboratory.”
Pull quote: “Are we buying too much? Is the growth in content truly worth our money?”
Pull quote: “So the big question for governments and funders as they consider how best to support the transition to public access is why some traditional publications cost so much (and would pass those alleged costs on to taxpayers) while Gold OA journals and Green self-archiving seem to be more cost-effective alternatives. A lot of additional transparency would be required before recommendations such as those in the Finch report could be taken seriously.”
Pull quote: “Many commentators look at what’s going on with digital scholarly publishing today and focus on transformation, even revolution. Now we have computers, and networks, and everything will be different! And of course the digital does bring with it some quite particular affordances, but many of our engagements with it seem to return us to an incunabular mode that resembles the experimentation that resulted from the adoption of other, earlier media forms. It’s not just that the more things change, the more they stay the same; rather, the more things change, the more we’re driven back into a set of first principles that help us figure out what the new things are.”
Pull quote: “We should not allow FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt), which is often spread by institutions that are trying to preserve the problem to which they see themselves as the solution (to paraphrase Clay Shirky), to narrow our vision of a sustainable system of scholarly publishing. The problem we should be addressing is predatory publications, OA and subscription-based, and publishing ethics across the board.”
Pull quote: “When you think about it, traditional publishing encourages a constant stream of breakthroughs, when in reality actual breakthroughs are few and far between. Rather than trumpeting every article as important in a quest to be published, these new venues encourage scientists to publish more of what they find, and in a more honest way. Some of that research may in fact prove broadly important in a field, while other research might simply be helpful for its methodological rigor or underlying data.”
Pull quote: “The selector tool works by comparing the author’s abstract, or short article description, with keywords from abstracts from a database of more than 18,000 journal titles. Results are ranked by relevance, or an author can choose to filter and refine the results by Thompson Reuters Impact Factor, by preference for Open Access, or by frequency of publication.”
Michael Kelley, "New OA Journal, Backed by O’Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing," Digital Shift
Pull quote from Peter Suber: “‘For authors who would normally publish in fee-based OA journals, even occasional publishing in PeerJ could save them money,’ Suber said. ‘The same is true for authors who would normally publish in subscription-based or non-OA journals, where about 75 percent of titles levy page charges, color charges, or other author-side fees.’”
Pull quote: “The core idea is that scholars will be able to pay one fee (starting at $99) and be able to publish on the PeerJ platform for life. The truly interesting aspect of this is that PeerJ is peer reviewed. It’s kind of like a cross between PLoS ONE and the arXiv. To me it seems to resemble what we think of as a disciplinary repository like arXiv in that it will be a large collection of articles that will be at least somewhat unstructured. But at the same time, like a PLos ONE, will also have very strict peer review.”
Pull quote: “It’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants if the giants are hiding under the bed.”
Pull quote: “She wishes, however, that RUSQ’s editors and supporters would come clean. Open access has a history of paying a good bit too much heed to rose-tinted glasses. It’s important to get mistakes and failures out there for examination, uncomfortable though that process often is (not least because a few open-access advocates sling blame around with hurricane-force winds, and just as indiscriminately).”
Pull quote: “The deal here is that Open Access is not a fringe issue any more. It’s not just something that idealistic young researchers like to shout about. It’s a major part of the strategy of one — several, actually — of the world’s top universities. I’d argue that it’s been a moral imperative for a long time. Now Open Access has become an economic imperative, too.”
Pull quote: “Refusing these ‘untenable’ conditions will bring pain to the users and the librarians, who must deal with declining collections and frustrated clients. But like those who fought the untenable labor conditions of manufacturing, farming, and transportation, we are beginning to see that uniting our efforts against the unsustainable practices of those who control the the capital of scholarly communication will stabilize the delicate balance of powers and enable the progress of knowledge.”
