My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Being a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle and the Author’s Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO), in…

I’m very excited this conversation is not only opening up a dialogue about review processes, costs, and relevance, but also disparity in academic resources across the US (and abroad)…
If there were to be a count, I believe it would come out that most colleges in fact have limited access to academic journals for student and faculty research. And as Ben notes above, “But what of occasional readers such as hobbyists or independent scholars?” Most US academic research libraries do not allow guest online access, and university IDs are required at the door for entrance. The situation seems created to separate scholarship from any notion of public education.

Lev’s comment that the current state of peer-review is a (currently) unavoidable nuisance reminds me of a statement by Kathleen Fitzpatrick at an MLA panel on the state of scholarly book publishing. Referring to the well-known “crisis” whereby academic presses are facing increasing pressures at the same time that academics still face considerable tenure pressure to get that first book out, Kathleen said that it’s not quite accurate to say that scholarly publishing is dead or dying. Rather, it is “undead” since it continues to shamble on in a husk of its original form. She didn’t want to push the metaphor too far, understandably, but I can’t help adding that maybe the best we can do with scholarly book publishing for now is keep it from eating our brains.

While I was at MLA, I got to attend a workshop put on by the CELJ for new editors of journals. The goal of the session was just for current and experienced editors to share some of their approaches to the logistics and drudgery of putting out a journal. I learned from several interesting and well-informed points of view, but even though there was much discussion of economic models for publishing, no one thought to mention electronic publishing or open access at all. The closest was a brief mention of using subscription services like Project MUSE and EBSCO to make money off of back issues. Granted, each editor present ran a print journal, and CELJ does include and support electronic journals, but the fact that it didn’t come up suggests that we still have some ground to cover.

Of course, Digital media studies should be one of the fields leading the way toward real, electronically-enabled open-access, but it also occurred to me that here on this thread, we, similarly, haven’t really talked about print-only journals except obliquely. I realize many, probably most, primarily-print journals also make their content available through services like JSTOR, but many don’t. Is submitting to such a journal also “anti-publishing” since the fixedness of print denies access to those without means in a far broader sweep than is the case with pay-wall journals?

Maybe it is. But as long as we still get “credit” (CV-wise) to publish with such journals (maybe even more so than open-access), I imagine many of will continue feeding the zombies.

Greg, the economics of academic journals is certainly a tricky issue – and not the same issue as access, or the free availability of the publication on the Web. Whether academic journals are paid for by something that looks like distasteful “subsidy publishing,” or by subscriptions, or by grants, it’s still basically the same pool of university money that funds them. I just think that money should buy availability to the public, in this day and age, when it comes to research and scholarship about digital media.

Sherman, I’m sure an editor could read my reply as something other than hostile. I wrote that I would be glad to review for the journal if it becomes open access. Obviously, that means I do not disagree with how it is being edited and do not have anything personal against the editorial staff or the publisher. My objection is that the publication isn’t available to the public – specifically and concretely, to the people in my field who I converse with here on Grand Text Auto but who are not academics. I understand that in different fields, and when it comes to different journals that have been around for decades, there are circumstances that can make the immediate adoption of open access difficult or impossible. I’m talking about my field, digital media, and I’ve made specific arguments above about why the availability of publications to the public is possible and necessary in this field. Referring to access as a spectrum may be useful, but it does not automatically make the different types of publishing into a happy rainbow of diversity, and it doesn’t make the wrong publishing policy into the right one.

Lev, thanks for this reply. Your comment, which builds on Scott’s and some that I have heard privately, may be the most persuasive argument for open access. If journals will not truly publish academics’ work for them, making it available on the web, scholars – including the leading ones in a field – will increasingly not bother publishing in journals. It’s amazing that the institution of the journal can’t handle a publication task for academics these days, leaving them to do it for themselves. Thanks, anyway, for making your writing available online – my students appreciated the ease of access to “What is Digital Cinema” last semester.

First, let me say that I have never regretted taking on the editorship of an open-access journal. Philosophically, I think it’s absolutely right. But I also respect those who work in journals where there are no open-access journals or whether they really cannot do the best work without an economic model that is different. Given that, I’m not sure how an editor could read your reply to a review request as anything but hostile. We’re all familiar with not having time to review, not thinking that one has the expertise to write a decent referee report, or recusing for some reason, but because the economic model of a journal isn’t on the cutting edge? In many journals, editors do not control the economics because a learned society contracts with a publisher.

Please read Willinsky’s book. (MIT Press has made a PDF of the entire book available free.) He explains that a better way to think about the issue is to think about opening access as an active verb or as a spectrum, not the dichotomy you describe. What about journals that open their articles a year after publication: is that open enough for you? And if so, is your letter to editors going to push them towards advocating that change or away from it?

Oh well, probably something will turn up; I expect that in a decade this will be a non-issue.

Within digital media, I should have already mentioned that there is also the new, open-access Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture.

I really think this strategy won’t reach any part of the public beyond those who already using them. At a time when one may reach interested readers throughout the public for the most obscure of topics, research published this way seems destined for irrelevancy.

At my university (Bath) you can get a year’s subscription to our library — access to all our books and journals — for seventy pounds. That’s pretty cheap as business expenses go.

But what of occasional readers such as hobbyists or independent scholars? $150/year — plus the trip to the university during library open hours, parking, etc. — may be reasonable for someone using research professionally. It’s a bit much for a parent with an unrelated day-job, for whom this is not a business expense.

Whether or not members of the broad public read an author’s paper may well be irrelevant to the author. But to the extent that useful criticism happens online, and academic authors benefit from engagement with non-institutional voices, reliance on pay-to-read journals puts the author’s work at a competitive disadvantage.

In my own case, I’ve found only about a fifth of the papers I’ve read on manuscript encoding to be useful for my work developing manuscript transcription tools. There are papers I have not read, however, because they are behind an IEEE pay-wall. By some standard, the fee is modest — if I was certain the paper contained exactly what I needed, it’d be worth $18. Absent that certainty, however, it’s not worth it, so those papers will have no impact at all on my work.

This competitive disadvantage must be weighed against the advantages you cite, or circumvented by publishing drafts or such.

Few of the open access journals raise money by charging their authors fees, a surprising finding according to Morris. In fact, page charges, charges for color images, reprint charges and other fees for authors are considerably more common among subscription journals, the study found.

That from this news release, which discusses the study “The Facts about Open Access.”

Neither of the digital media journals I mentioned – Game Studies and Digital Humanities Quarterly – charge authors to submit or publish their work.

On the other hand, all IEEE journals, including the closed-access IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics in which you published this year, Dr. Bryson, have voluntary page charges. I’m sure that neither of us think that these journals are scams.

I can see where your distaste for open access journals, and for Elsevier, might come from, given that you’re an associate editor for a Sage Publications journal. No one is arguing against the editorial quality that I’m sure you uphold in your work on Adaptive Behavior. I know that Game Studies maintains high standards in their reviewing and editing and I have every impression that Digital Humanities Quarterly does.

The matter I’m concerned with is not how to improve or neglect editorial work, but how our discipline (loosely, digital media – the field that Grand Text Auto readers and bloggers work in) might better communicate with the public. Asking all the electronic literature authors and video game creators we know to track down academic libraries with article services and then pay to subscribe to these is one idea, but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very persuasive one.

It is perfectly fine to charge money for a service, and journals provide a service in helping the scientific process by making the reviewing and editing thing happen. I’m in computer science and so I have published in workshops, conferences, crap journals and excellent journals, and I can promise you that there are no reviews as good as those from good journals (well, actually, I got some really useful reviews from NIPS once.) And as a writer, the good journals that offer editorial as well as peer-review advice — well, no wonder they are better to read.

I think a better way to address the problems you mention is to have people realize that universities are public resources. At my university (Bath) you can get a year’s subscription to our library — access to all our books and journals — for seventy pounds. That’s pretty cheap as business expenses go. You can support education and get educated at the same time. Bath’s library also has a widely-available service where they can purchase articles for you if they don’t subscribe to them from other university libraries that do at what I think are lower rates than the on-line ones, though I can’t swear to it. As as someone who passed up making dot.com salaries to devote my life to academia, I must admit that one of the few perks of the job is that I never see the bill when I do request articles that way.

Also, like Scott above, all my papers are available online in draft and sometimes nearly final form. When I run into a journal that my library doesn’t subscribe to, I can nearly always find a free version on line if it’s about computer science, and sometimes if its anthropology or psychology. Biologists are a bit more uptight.

So basically, I think that while some publishers (notably Elsevier) are making way too much money off of free labour, there are a lot of good journals and publishers out there — and academics and universities — that deserve public support. You probably live near a university — why not join their library?

I was just saying that for those who have similar principles, there really seems to be little point in volunteering to review articles for a for-profit, closed-access journal.

The benefits to doing so are, as best as I can figure:

- You offer service to your academic community by vetting articles and suggesting how they can be improved.
- You get to mention on your CV that you review articles for a journal – really a very minor benefit, not comparable to a publication.

The disadvantage is:

- You work to further entrench a publishing model that you think is bad for the field and the public.

In this case, when the issue came up, I did these things, which seemed to me to be fair and reasonable:

- I explained that I will not review articles unless the journal becomes open access, making my principles and my position clear and making it clear that I don’t object to the editing of the journal, just the way it is currently published.
- I turned to an open-access journal that I have not reviewed for and offered to be a reviewer, so I have the chance to serve the community in this way (and a chance at the CV line).

I doubt anyone would imagine refusing to read the articles that appear in a closed-access journal and giving up their important findings and insights. Without advocating a boycott on accessing such journals, or even on submitting to such journals, I think there are still ways that that younger scholars can influence how academic publishing is done in our field. Preferring open-access channels (even if we still submit to other journals) might be one way; letting our administrations know about open access and supporting our librarians in advocating for them are other ways. Using our time and effort to review for open-access journals, rather than for journals that restrict most of the electronic literature and game designer crowd from reading them, seems to me to be another low-cost, low-effort way to advance toward a better environment for publication and communication about digital media.

I might even volunteer to review for a non-profit closed-access journal if they convinced me that there really was no sustainable way they could operate otherwise, but I certainly wouldn’t do so for a for-profit closed-access journal. (From the reader’s perspective, open-access is of course always superior.)

As Nick states OA is often discussed as an “academic” concern of little relevance to the general public (even those members of that public with a keen interest in the subject matter at hand). However, I would note simply that as an editor the shear volume of information requests I’ve received from the general public, high school students, undergrads, grads and those affiliated with foreign institutions has been impressive. It certainly points to the availability of active, interested, and wider audience once authors, publishers and institutions embrace OA.

“Gold” OA (where authors/institutions pay an upfront publication cost) seems particularly egregious form that benefits readers at the expense of raising a “pay-to-play” bar for authors who are already providing free intellectual labor. “Green” OA solutions (where publishers “allow” authors to self-archive while continuing to publish subscription-based journals) are far more appealing. Green modes also have a great potential for broad, near-term, acceptance–especially if educational institutions would support mandates for post-print OA archiving and sort out the depository issues. In the end I have to state my preference for any form of “pure” OA that might come to exist, particularly one that elegantly solves the issue through a distributed editorial labor model combined with efficiencies in publishing technologies. Call me a futurist, but I see that model operating well many cases even today.

Recently, our journal (www.othervoices.org) was approached by the Open Humanities Press, a grassroots initiative to form a consortium of OA journals to promote the benefits of OA publication, address the “credibility gap” in OA, and support established OA journals through relevant technological initiatives (e.g. meta-data tagging, accessibility, etc.). If anyone here is affiliated with, or considering founding, a journal on digital media, you might find them a valuable resource.

The issues Nick raises are especially important for humanities scholars, since as grad students we rarely get paid research positions, so we largely had to pay our own way to conferences. About 10 years ago I presented a paper on technical writing instruction at an engineering conference. Fortunately the writing center where I was working at the time helped pay the expenses, which were an order of magnitude higher than the expenses at the humanities conferences I was used to attending.

That’s not quite what I’m getting at.

Assume that you (an aspiring scholar in pursuit of an academic career) have written a paper on X, and that I (a member of the public with no affiliation to an institution that subscribes to for-pay journals) am interested in X. Furthermore, X is as obscure as “FPS electracy” or “collaborative handwriting interpretation”.

What’s important to me is that upon Googling X, I’m able to read your paper immediately — without making an ILL request or spending the price of a nice meal.

What’s important to you is that you maximize the job-acquisition potential of your paper.

These are not entirely unrelated — as you point out, your hiring committee might not have access to the for-pay journal you publish through. Similarly, hiding your paper behind a subscription wall necessarily limits its visibility to people who might increase your job-acquisition potential — perhaps by citing it in their own work, perhaps by commenting on it in ways that inspire or improve your next paper.

But for my primary and your secondary purposes, it doesn’t matter to me whether you participate in a green OA journal or a gold one, as long as you put your paper somewhere it can be accessed without registration and payment. In effect, the for-pay copy becomes irrelevant to me and many of your readers.

Unfortunately, not all publication entries have equal value to the job hunter. When faced with a subscription-only journal publication versus an OA publication, you may decide that the benefits of publication time or reputation outweigh the consignment of your paper to relative obscurity. I really couln’t condemn that choice — as a software developer, I face similar quandries regarding open-sourcing my own work versus trying to make a living off it.

I suspect that the OA debate will be resolved neither by authors nor by readers. The scientific publishing panelists at SXSWi this year agreed that the fight was between funders and journals.

I’m not sure, but I would hope so. Officially, the best I can tell is that I would need to ask permission, which may or may not mean that said permission would be automatically granted.

I think I see where you’re going — if I’m publishing in a subscription journal which my potential hiring committee doesn’t have access to, I don’t get any benefit from having it published there unless I can post it somewhere else on my own. Even if I can’t, though, I still get the CV line, and I can send someone a copy if they’re interested enough. That’s not an ideal situation, and I’m ultimately not happy about it, but in some cases it may be better than waiting a year or two for it to come out, unfortunately.

I’d point out that there are different kinds of open access. Many copyright transfer agreements for “toll” journals explicitly allow the author to make a copy available through their homepage or institution, even though the publisher puts their copy behind a wall. This has become known as “green” open access. The end result is very close to explicitly OA (”gold” open access) journals: everyone gets to read the article, even if they sometimes have to go through an extra step of finding the author’s homepage (or, in disciplines better organized than mine, a repository).

I don’t know if you had green OA journals in mind, but I’d hesitate to “punish” them by not participating in them; while mildly perverse, green OA is much better than toll access.

BTW, the nature of the publisher, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t determinative: not-for-profit scholarly societies are often just as “anti-publishing” as for-profit corporations.