Harvard University has adopted a new policy that may jeopardize the future of academic publishing. According to a piece on Bloomberg.com, the school’s professors have now been afforded much more leeway to publish their research for free online.
Harvard’s decision lends support to the growing open-access movement in academia, an approach opposed by journal-industry representatives who say bypassing journals and their peer-review process may harm the quality of published research.
“This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country,” Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion to adopt the new policy, said in a statement released after the vote. “It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”
The article gets at the other side of the argument by quoting Ian Russell, chief executive officer of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in the U.K.:
Russell, who represents both nonprofit and commercial publishers, said journals enhance scholarly work through the peer review process, the prestige they carry and links to previous work.
“Why should that be free? That’s value-added material that publishers are adding over and above the raw material,” Russell said. “It’s like saying you can dig silver out of the ground, and therefore silver knives and forks should be free.”
The image of an academic digging for silver is hilarious. I also thought scholars were prohibited the use of knives and forks for safety reasons.
It’s also like saying you can dig ants out of the ground, and therefore ants should be free. Oh wait a second, if you dig them out yourself, they are free. hmmm, maybe that is even dumber than the dumb original image. Let us try: Kumbajah, journals are good, people make money, making money is good, journals should stay. hmmm, yah… good.
From what I have seen, peer review in journals, can be like having republicans peer review George Bush or democrats peer review Hillary Clinton at times. If an acedemic article is on shakey grounds it may take years and a different competing journal before those shakey grounds are admitted and the original journal will tend to be hush hush.
I’m a year late but: I think it’s a smart move. Journals make people make money, sure, but the scholars whose work is published rarely get any money for their work. Also, many online journals are peer-reviewed. The journal industry is simply afraid that they will lose income to free, open-access journals. I think people (including scholars) want power to decide where to publish what and who reeds their work and how much they should pay, and I see no problem in that. Besides, published journals are more prestigeous anyway. It would take 5 essays in an online, peer-reviewed publication to accomplish the same degree of prestige as in a print journal.