On one hand, I'm excited to announce that my article "Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence" has been published in Convergence 14(1).... On the other hand, I'm deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it. It is not because you aren't interested (although many of you might not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls....
I agreed to publish my piece at Sage for complicated reasons, but...
I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I'd like to ask other academics to do the same....
Here's what I'd like to propose:
Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals. Unlike younger scholars, you don't need the status markers because you're tenured or in industry. Use that privilege to help build new journals that are not strapped to broken business models. Help build the reputations of new endeavors so that they can be viable publishing venues for future scholars....
Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction. Encourage your members to publish in them. Run competitions for best open-access publications and have senior scholars write committee letters for younger scholars whose articles are stupendous but published in non-traditional venues.
Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow....
Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you're in a new field....
More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure....
All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals....
All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals....
Libraries: Begin...adding them to your catalogue....
Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains....
Academic publishers: Wake up or get out....
Comment. I support most of Danah's suggestions, I strongly support OA journals, and I'm glad to see that her post has created good buzz in the academic blogosphere. However, her post, and nearly all the posts I've seen in response, assume that publishing in an OA journal is the only way to provide OA to a peer-reviewed research article. That's not so, and it needlessly ties the hands of researchers who want to make their own work OA. (Boyd did self-archive a 2006 preprint of her article.) Here's the comment I posted to her blog, with a few minor touch ups:
I support your decision to make your future papers open access (OA). One way to do that is to submit them to OA journals. But another way is to publish them in a conventional journal and then deposit copies of the peer-reviewed postprints in an OA repository. Either method provides bona fide OA, and knowing your options can give you more choices about where to publish your work.
About two-thirds of surveyed non-OA journals allow some form of author self-archiving. To find out whether a given journal or publisher does so, use the SHERPA/RoMEO database.
Sage, for example, allows self-archiving of the peer-reviwed postprint but only after a 12 month delay. That's a bad policy. I'd recommend publishing in an OA journal or in a conventional journal allowing immediate postprint archiving.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
