Wall Street Journal Article Sums Up Battle Between Open Access and For-Profit Publishers
Peer Pressure: Scholarly Journals’ Premier Status Is Diluted by Web; More Research Is Free Online Amid Spurt of Start-Ups; Publishers’ Profits at Risk; A Revolt on UC’s Campuses
Abstract:
The publishers’ prestige derives from the rigorous system of peer review, in which a journal’s editorial board will select experts in a field to vet articles. At some top scholarly journals, less than 10% of submitted articles make it into a publication. In turn, the peer- review system lends authority to a scholar’s work, and has long been a springboard to academic advancement.
Some scholars think publishing should operate like the Linux computer operating system, where programmers build on each other’s work in an ongoing, collaborative project. In the scholarly realm, a database called arXiv — pronounced "archive," as if the "x" were the Greek letter "chi" — has become a repository of scholarship in the physics field. It’s owned and operated by Cornell University and partially supported by the National Science Foundation. If the UC administration has its way, something like that would be the norm throughout academia.
"That alarmed us," says a Reed Elsevier spokeswoman in Amsterdam. More than 100 UC faculty members serve as senior editors of Elsevier journals and about 1,000 serve on editorial boards. The publisher fanned out across the campuses, drumming up support among friendly faculty with breakfasts and other meetings. The spokeswoman says the company concluded that most UC faculty members didn’t know about the boycott call or didn’t support it.
[Bernard Wysocki Jr.. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: May 23, 2005. pg. A.1]
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