John Hopkins on Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:55:07 +0200 (CEST)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> some more nuanced thoughts on SWARTZ


Subscription rates are extremely high, and increasing, for high profile
journals - which are mostly paid by libraries. The proceeds generally do
not return to the author, they go entirely to the publisher. So the
question is: How much should go to publisher versus author?
      Paid by library = Paid to author + Publisher overhead
Is the university library paying for content or for access?

Was it in nettime that someone pointed to an essay describing a rather elegant (but very utopian) solution to this conundrum. unfortunately I don't have the reference, but the gist was that a university would quit all journal subscriptions and instead use the money to have an in-house editorial/production staff that will take content generated by the university and self-publish, archive, and make available all of it for free to the wider community (taxpayers for public institutions, and so on). obviously this would have to include 'everyone' all at once, and there would develop a similar power hierarchy driven by elite institutions (with enormous endowments), but it seemed like a nice idea when I read it...

jh


Oh, and a PS rather than to send another note -- slightly off-topic, but in Light of the Norwegian irruption -- I wrote some notes about my encounters with neo-Nazi sympathies when I lived in Iceland in the 1990s: http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/43169

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
John Hopkins
exploring the patterns and flows
of cosmological power @
http://neoscenes.net/
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org