When, Lord...

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist

So when does academic publishing get disrupted?

Update:

Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy

Thumbs down on small payments, says Shirkey

Clay Shirky: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers:

The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition.

What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers;

All of which seems sensible to me with regard to commodified news. But what about other sorts of publishing and archival marketeering? He's at FASTforward09, and seems not yet to have moderated his comments. Here's one I left earlier today:

Clay, do you see no role for microeconomics for vended content? One area where one has imagined it proving useful is academic treasure houses like JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, which simply close themselves off to potential readers by operating within an institutional subscription format.

What sort of model would you prefer?

Clouds and walls

Amazon's Cloud:

"We routinely send people monthly bills for 17 cents," Bezos said. "If you store a gigabyte of data for a month, we'll send you a bill for 15 cents."*

But you'll pay JSTOR or Projectile(vomit) MUSE $10, $15, or more for an article for dated research on some rarified academic subject...

Gavin Baker of SPARC has a podcast on changing the scholarly publishing market:

"The DOAJ is growing at a remarkable rate" - over 3,300 journals with total open access. See the DOAR.

*The 2008 annual subscription price for the journal Brain Research is $21,744.

Prometheus must pay for the thankless mammaries

Over at Open Access News, Peter Suber notes that high energy Physics, among other fields, benefits from access to previous research. Anyone who gives a damn about knowledge might see his point.

ARTstor, JSTOR, Project Mute and other pay-per-view dispensers turn human knowing into cognitive lap dances.

JSTORiana

The Technology Editor, ZDNet UK, finds something lacking in JSTOR's closed world formula:

ask any independent researcher. There are a lot of them out there, writing books, building businesses, experimenting with ideas, inventing the future, educating themselves, trying hard to participate in the great human endeavour of standing on the shoulders of giants. They will all have had the experience of finding exactly what they want, only to be told "NO".

It is extraordinarily frustrating, and the exact opposite of JSTOR's laudable aims. Furthermore, it is unthinkable that the situation will continue like this indefinitely. I cannot envision a future where this huge library of public knowledge is forever denied to those who need it. Every sign, every pointer, every tiny eddy in the tide, says otherwise.

The wall is pernicious. Break it down.

That guy up there is not the Technology editor, ZDNet, UK. He's Surinder Kumar Mandal of Bihar, India, featured in Jan Banning's extraordinary series of photos of Bureaucrats of the World. I have had that page of images open ever since finding it (I wish I could remember how) more than a week ago.

Why build a digitized scholarly archive, searchable via the public internet, if access to it is controlled like some kind of top-secret database?

That's Christopher Barden, a longtime reader of The Stingy Scholar, which seems to be some sort of educator's blog with, disturbingly, a very large standing image of Michelle Malkin in the right hand column, where indeed she belongs - not that she's standing, actually, one can't be sure, we only see a blow-up of the front of her head, i.e., her face, but the image is standing, sort of like a foetid pool of cess, right there on the right every time you flick or click to a story.

No, no, that's not Christopher Barden, up there behind the desk. That's Sergey Mikhailovich Osipchuk, policeman of Oktjabrskij, Tomsk province, Siberia. I wouldn't want anyone to confuse scholar/editor critics of JSTOR with deskwarming bureaucrats who seem to man their posts with a certain gatekeeperly determination.

There must be some connection with the whole JSTOR thing, I just can't put my finger on it. . .



P.S.: "Chris," a commenter at The Stingy Scholar, asks who to sue at JSTOR and PROJECTilevomit MUSE, calling them jointly "the great firewall of America."

We don't need no steenkin JSTOR

Directory of Open Access Journals -- via Dialogic. It lists 66 journals of Philosophy alone, including various publications from places like the Ecole normale supérieure, the University of Florence, the University of Dublin, the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the University of Trieste, the Queensland University of Technology (Foucault studies), Rhodes University, South Africa, the University of Limerick, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia, the Universidad del Zulia, Centro de Estudios Filosoficos, and lots more, even a couple of USian universities.

Then there are dozens of journals for arts, music, religion, languages, linguistics, etc. Have a look around. Look up something you're interested in. They are not JSTOR, or PROJECTilevomitMUSE, or SCIENCE. They'll actually let you in.

Here's a bit of a letter from David Amram, published in Chapter & Verse from the University of Leeds:

I spent the first day in Windber giving concerts, and hosting a screening of Pull My Daisy, the film in which I collaborated with Kerouac in 1959, prior to a marathon 12 hour reading of On the Road the next day, for which I provided some of music, as well as playing between and during the readings with local musicians. I also had a show of my caricatures of everyone from that era.

The DOAJ might not be the most beautifully designed site you'll ever see, but it is unquestionably the most beautiful site I've seen in a very long time.

Agriculture and Food Sciences
Arts and Architecture
Biology and Life Sciences
Business and Economics
Chemistry
Earth and Environmental Sciences
General Works
Health Sciences
History and Archaeology
Languages and Literatures
Law and Political Science
Mathematics and Statistics
Philosophy and Religion
Physics and Astronomy
Science General
Social Sciences
Technology and Engineering

Sign the Petition.

How's this for zeitgeisty? For background, this.