Maybe the solution is for faculty to work with their universities to find ways to support a scholarly society without the condition being the restriction of research availability. There is enough money in the system to be creative about this, but not so long as our scholarly societies are extracting it from our libraries and giving it to for profit publishersIt seems obvious that somehow some publishers have managed to capture a goldmine and managed the hegemonic trick of persuading people that this is the natural state of affairs, as it was in the beginning, is now and evermore shall be.
Disintemediation is the logic once the hegemony has been revealed: the publishers really are the telephone sanitisers of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. They offer no real service that could not be done just as well by the collective that is the scholars themselves. Peer-reviewed blogs make as much sense. Crowd sourcing the crit might even do so; the reputation of reviewers would become the imprimatur. The title of the publication is an alibi.
In effect, peer review is the imprimatur, already, all on its own: the fact is just hidden behind the curtain of the wonderful Journal of Oz. What you've got is a bunch of people who already know something about the matter in hand and so can offer a credible opinion on the worthwhileness of the ideas and research. All you need to do is bring that together. A journal isn't necessary for that; it is merely a shorthand, a proxy for the expertise and reputations of the scholars concerned. It's a shorthand produced by the economics of paper publishing in the past and is now sponging off the reputation and historical legacy.
The sleight of hand is the psycho-historical fact that probably most of these scholars at some point have measured their self-worth as scholars by being invited to be part of the journal's vetting and barring procedures. They feel a debt of gratitude to what they think has 'made' them. And then they have 'forgotten' that they themselves -over time- are actually what props up the rep of the journal.
The journal really is otiose.
It has merely managed to inveigle it's way into the charmed cycle by virtue of controlling a disposable part of the publishing process (which too few have noticed is disposable, or are scared to notice).
The emperor has no clothes. However the lad has been paid to keep schtumm.
All it needs is a bunch of scholars with a good bunch of rep to set up a collective and to publish electronically with whatever copyright license they see fit (I would assume some kind of Creative Commons would be appropriate) and Robert is ones niece's father.
Disintermediation would be complete.
Apologies to those put out of work in publishing paper copies, but most of them could presumably find other jobs in academic or publishing or curating posts enabled by the funding freed up from university libraries not having to pay huge fees to unnecessary journals.
I shed no tears for the fat cat owners who've been riding this gravy train: I assume their offshore accounts should tide them over.
Not that kind of “living in the past”… | Savage Minds:
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