One of the concerns that often gets raised early in discussions of electronic scholarly publishing is that of business model --how will the venture be financed...?...I also don’t want to fall prey to what has been called the “paper = costly, electronic = free” fallacy. Obviously, many of the elements of traditional academic press publishing that cost --whether in terms of time, or of money, or both-- will still exist in an all-electronic [OA] press. Texts still must be edited and transformed from manuscript to published format, for starters....But what I do want to argue for, building off of John Holbo’s recent post, is the importance of collective, cooperative contributions of academic labor to any electronic scholarly publishing venture. For a new system like that we’re hoping to build in ElectraPress to succeed, we need a certain amount of buy-in from those who stand to benefit from the system, a commitment to get the work done, and to make the form succeed. I’ve been thinking about this need for collectivity through a comparison with the model of open-source software. Open source has succeeded, in large part, due to the commitments that hundreds of programmers have made, not just to their individual projects but to the system as a whole. Most of these programmers work regular, paid gigs, working on corporate projects, all the while reserving some measure of their time and devotion for non-profit, collective projects. That time and devotion are given freely because of a sense of the common benefits that all will reap from the project’s success. So with academics....[Our] job also involves, or allows, to varying degrees, reserving some measure of our time and devotion for projects that are just ours, projects whose greatest benefits are to our own pleasure and to the collective advancement of the field as a whole. If we’re already operating to that extent within an open-source model, what’s to stop us from taking a further plunge, opening publishing cooperatives, and thereby transforming academic publishing from its current (if often inadvertent) non-profit status to an even lower-cost, collectively underwritten financial model?...I want to ...[suggest,] as John has, that a collective publishing system might operate less like those kinds of group assignments than like food co-ops: in order to be a member of the co-op-- and membership should be required in order to publish through it-- everyone needs to put in a certain number of hours stocking the shelves and working the cash register....I’m strongly of the opinion that, if academic publishing is going to survive into the next decades, we need to stop thinking about how it’s going to be saved, and instead start thinking about how we are going to save it. And a business model that relies heavily on the collective-particularly, on labor that is shared for everyone’s benefit-seems to me absolutely crucial to such a plan.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/03/2006 09:32:00 AM.
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.
