Danah Boyd joined the call for reforming how academics publish their work by calling for a boycott of non-open-access journals …and, provided a list of suggestions on what needs to be done now:
- Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals.
- Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction.
- Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow.
- Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you’re in a new field.
- More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure.
- All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals.
- All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals.
- Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue.
- Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains.
- Academic publishers: Wake up or get out.
(The above list is abstracted from her original post.)
I probably fall under the “young punk” category in her list, and publish in both traditional and new media as an attempt to compromise and appeal to both conservative and cutting-edge scholars. How can we move away from a culture of appeasement of 20th century academic culture and refocus our knowledge diffusion toward media formats that are more appealing to younger and more tech-savvy academics –such as blogs, and the spaces where open access journals and other, new, open media interface? How long until the academy will finally accept highly commented and linked blog posts as legitimate, peer-reviewed articles in a tenure review?
Comments