The New Media Diva

Danah Boyd, a PhD student at the School of Information at Berkeley (US), has posted a manifesto of sorts on “locked-down” academic journals on her website. A paper of hers has been published in the journal Convergence.

From Boyd’s site:

“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) (special issue edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). 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 [Publications] is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls.”

A majority (I believe) of academic publishers will only publish an article if the author agrees not to put their work online. Sage, according to Boyd, allows republishing a year after they publish it.

She goes on to say (emphasis hers):

“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.”

Boyd details the economics and, let’s be honest, the academic politics behind getting published (tenure, prestige and so on). Later in the post, she proposes some points to counteract the hold that publishers have on research that, in my opinion, should be free and open to the public. Here are a couple of them:

“*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.

(snip)

*Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains. You are respected institutions. The bandwidth cost of hosting a journal would be much less than allowing your undergrads access YouTube. Support your faculty in creating university-branded journals and work with them to run conferences and do other activities to help build the reputation of such nascent publications. If it goes well, your brand will gain status too.

*Academic publishers: Wake up or get out. Silencing the voices of academics is unacceptable. You’re not helping scholarship or scholars. Find a new business model or leave the journal publishing world. You may be making money now, but your profits will not continue to grow using this current approach. Furthermore, I’d bank on academics shunning you within two generations. If you think more than a quarter ahead, you know that it’s the right thing to do for business as well as for the future of knowledge.”

Now granted, I don’t agree with all of Boyd’s points (see the “Young Punks” section of her points on her website), but she makes a good argument. With access to papers coming at a premium price (not only in terms of cost for whoever wants to read it, but for the author who has to agree to an embargo to get published), the knowledge that the academic wants to share stays within a set circle: I would hope that this is not the end result someone writing an academic paper wants to achieve. As Boyd states, a person may not want to write for a wide audience, but what they write should be widely accessible especially if they desire it to be.