The problem is that the argument for the involvement of the mediation of a publisher is nusually cast in technical or financial terms, that, on the one hand, there is some need for their special skill set or infrastructure, or, on the other hand, there is need to link publication to markets. However, the sad truth is that the former arguments no longer hold, as we demonstrated more or less by being editors, so the real problem is that academics are afraid to try new venues, the older venues have so much accumulated prestige that their monopoly is retained long after any possible technical or fiscal argument or alibi for this monopoly. That’s why any arguments trying to justify the monopoly by referring to the labor of editors, which is always unpaid, except for the copy-editors who basically do less than 5% of the editing anyway, is ridiculous. In some journals, the copy-editors are quite interventionist, which is fine but once again they also add many many errors in their zeal, but at the end of the day, there are journals which run for profit that basiclaly don’t do any copy-editing either, that’s all done by the unpaid academic editors or a grad student intern. Any way you cut it, attempting to justify these monopolies by reference to the technical or market orders is simply an alibi to avoid recognition that it is simply the dead hand of prestige, and prestige is not in itself anything but a rstatement of ‘that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it will be, unless it changes’.

One love. I’d also like to say that past boycotts of non-OA journals were entirely successful. Just look at how many open access journals we have today?

I think a more constructive question would be: Why should we publish in traditional, locked down journals?

Who will maintain the self-archived versions? How do we maintain consistant links over time? Is it really intelligent to have the responsibilty of maintaining access fall on the author himself?

I support this boycott fully. All academic journals which publish funded publically MUST go open access. On this, there is no question in my mind.

Self-archiving is nonsense. Open access journals, with well organized databases and systems of organization are essential. It is also essential that we remove all the DRM issues. Right now, it is impossible to organize scholarship into an easy to access and navigate database because it is illegal to compile such information in a new way/experimental way.

Publishers should not have any control over how academic information is distributed and used. End of story.

For those who say otherwise: Good luck finding your self-archived file. Good luck having it incorporated in other works.

Steve Harnad: This is not about going the surest and fastest way. It is about carefully restructuring the accessibility of information so that the public can benefit, and so that it can be used in new unpredictable ways.

Publishers, with their draconian rights schemes make the organization of academic information a nightmare!

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

The boycott gambit was already tried nearly a decade ago and failed, resoundingly, and predictably, since even then it was not true that Open Access meant only or primarily Open Access Publishing (“Gold OA“). Even then, the fastest and surest way to 100% OA was OA Self-Archiving, by authors, of all the articles published in non-OA journals. This is called “Green OA“, and the single most common error about OA (and also the single thing that stands most in the way of progress toward 100% OA itself) is to imagine that OA means only or primarily Gold OA.

The way to reach OA is for authors to self-archive, and the way to ensure that they self-archive is for their universities and research funders to mandate self-archiving — as they are now beginning to do, at long last.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum