[LINK] Open publishing strike - editorial board resigns

[Tom Worthington]

On 31/03/13 09:48, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> ... tensions between commercial scientific/research journals ... and the value of sharing knowledge ...

Yes, the issue of academic publication costs issue has been brewing for 
years.

Publishing costs money, but how much is in dispute. Traditionally, 
academic journals charged a subscription fee to cover production and 
distribution costs. But with academics providing much of the labor for 
free and journals now distributed on-line, high cost journal are hard to 
justify.

An alternative is free open access, where anyone can read the articles 
without paying a fee. But someone still has to pay the cost of 
production. One option is for the author to pay the cost for their paper 
to be freely published. This works well for conference proceedings, 
where the cost of publication can be covered in the delegate's fee. The 
Australian Computer Society has provided a service to conferences, which 
has published thousands of papers in the "Conferences in Research and 
Practice in Information Technology" series: http://crpit.com/

Some journals are subsidized by a professional body, with most work done 
by unpaid volunteers and the publication free open access. An example is 
the Australasian Journal of Information Systems, with e-publishing 
facilities provided by the Australian Computer Society: 
http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis

An alternative model is for individual authors to pay for their article 
to be published. This creates some ethical problems, with the risk that 
quality will drop as the publisher chases money. But the more intimidate 
problem is the level of fees charged, which can be several thousand 
dollars, when the actual cost of publication is likely to be less than $200.

In my view, academic libraries should be offering on-line publishing 
services, to encourage authors to use free open access publishing. It is 
silly for libraries to install sophisticated computer systems just to do 
the last little bit of the publishing process: providing access to 
content. It would require little extra software (which is available 
free) for the libraries to support the whole publishing process. 
Libraries could offer free publishing services to their customers, in 
return for being able to provide those publications free. The Open 
Journal Systems software allows for calls for papers to be issued, 
papers reviewed, edited, published and distributed: http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs

OJS is widely used by Australian universities, but not all of the 
journals are freely available: 
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aedu.au%2Fojs%2F

The ANU ePress provides eBooks free online, plus some eJounrals, such as 
the Aboriginal History Journal: 
http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Aboriginal+History+Volume+36%2C+2012/10311/cover.html



-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/