Re: <nettime> some more nuanced thoughts on publishing, editing, reading, using

[Gary Hall <gary.hall@connectfree.co.uk>]

Brian,

Thanks. No, it's not a glitch. Digitize This Book! was originally 
written and published as a print-on-paper (and not open access) text: 
partly as a way of drawing attention to some of the 
politico-institutional issues and difficulties the book is attempting to 
engage with around open access, certainly as it existed at that time. 
However, interestingly, and perhaps not altogether surprisingly, people 
have taken the title literally and posted it in various places around 
the net, including both Aaaaarg.org and Scribd.

All of which I guess raises a variation of the question Michael Gurstein 
asked regarding journals: given the number of independent, 
not-for-profit, open access book publishers that are available now - 
Open Book Publishers, re.press and so on - 'why is anyone still working 
for/publishing in/editing/reading/using or otherwise supporting the 
current more or less obscene system of academic for profit publishing' 
with regard to books, too?

(There's a fuller list of OA book publishers here: 
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Publishers_of_OA_books; and an 
interesting report on/overview of Open Access Models for eBooks in the 
Humanities and Social Sciences here: 
http://www.aupress.ca/documents/OpenAccessModels_OAPEN.pdf)

At the same time, I don't mean to give the impression all corporately 
owned, 'closed' publishers and journals are the politically co-opted 
tools of global capitalism, while the smaller, independent, 
not-for-profit open access publishers and journals are somehow able to 
elude all this. As my Open Humanities Press colleague Marta Brunner has 
pointed out to me, ‘many of us who work in public universities are 
already implicated by the ties of our institutions (e.g. to the 
military, to defence labs) that pay our salaries and therefore would 
also be paying for our open access publishing, to a certain extent, 
given... the volunteer economy of humanities-based OA.’

There are things we can do, though. For instance, something I've also 
suggested elsewhere, by way of building on the Striphas (there's an open 
pre-print version here: 
http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2009/09/0754/_.doc), 
is the establishment of an initiative whereby all academic editors and 
publishers are asked to make freely available details of both their 
sources of income and funding, and of all the sources of financial 
income and support pertaining to the journals they run. And that an 
equivalent directory to the DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO directories is set up 
- only in this case documenting all these various sources of income and 
support, together with information as to who the owners of the different 
academic journals are and, just as importantly, the other divisions, 
subsidiaries and activities of their various companies and 
organisations. It seems to me something along these lines would help 
provide today's 'precarious intellectuals' with the knowledge they need 
to make responsible political and ethical decisions as to who they want 
to publish with or undertake editorial work and peer review for.

I also like the fact that the processes of conglomeration in the 
academic publishing industry mean such an initiative wouldn't require as 
much time and effort as one might think. Striphas shows that ‘Reed 
Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis/Informa... 
publish about 6,000 journals between them.’ So, working to these 
figures, in order to cover 6,000 journals, or somewhere between a 
quarter and a fifth of all peer-reviewed journals, we'd only need to 
research and disclose details of four corporations.

Which almost brings us back round to one of the places where this 
discussion started. For according to some accounts at least, wasn't it 
information gathering of a not too dissimilar nature that Aaron Swartz 
was involved in regarding JSTOR?

Gary

> Gary, your post and the Strichas article have led me to a fascinating 
> work, namely your own "Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, 
> Or Why We Need Open Access Now." This pdf reads like an expanded, 
> in-depth synthesis of all the excellent debates we've had on this 
> topic on nettime over many years, since the Budapest Open Access 
> Initiative was launched in 2002. As I understand it, the book is not a 
> hacker call to piracy, but instead a program to achieve institutional 
> transformation, using the technical possibility of free access as a 
> wedge to open up the current university hierarchy and fight the 
> entrepreneurial trend with a new constructive program. It seems the 
> book was supposed to be available in the digitized form championed by 
> its title. And it is -- but as far as I can tell (perhaps due to some 
> technical glitch?), it's only available at the website-of-choice for 
> today's precarious generation: everybody's 
> library-of-the-future-right-now, aaaaarg.org. A recommended 
> destination for the alienated academic multitudes.
>
> best, Brian

--

Gary Hall
Research Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Co-editor of Culture Machine
http://www.culturemachine.net
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Website http://www.garyhall.info


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