A Blight from JSTOR

Here's a book about Ezra Pound, pounder of the flesh of Usura, that you can purchase as a paperback for $17.86 on Amazon:

Here's an academic note on Surette's book that's little more than one page long. You can purchase it from JSTOR for $34:

Hey JSTOR: "It gnaweth the thread and the loom" -

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The policies of academic journal publishers basically suck

As library budgets are cut nationwide due to the economic recession, it is time for universities to rethink the academic publishing model. The answer lies in open-access journal articles.

But apparently not at Stanford.

Thumbs down on small payments, says Shirkey

Clay Shirky: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers:

The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition.

What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers;

All of which seems sensible to me with regard to commodified news. But what about other sorts of publishing and archival marketeering? He's at FASTforward09, and seems not yet to have moderated his comments. Here's one I left earlier today:

Clay, do you see no role for microeconomics for vended content? One area where one has imagined it proving useful is academic treasure houses like JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, which simply close themselves off to potential readers by operating within an institutional subscription format.

What sort of model would you prefer?

HooHa

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online. Chron of High Ed

On the Hahvahd initiative to incentivize faculty to publish in a more open accessible way:

Robert Darnton, director of the university library: "it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn.”

Civilities:

Let's hope that a fraction of the bloggers who were up in arms over the Times 2-year "paywall" show the same amount of passion for this development....But anybody who's spent anytime thinking about the future of ideas (bloggers, and others) ought to realize that making information "open" is merely the first step.

Civilities cites Andrew Odlyzko's essay: "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals":

"Once a preprint was accepted, it would be available to anyone."

Peter Suber has several pertinent comments

See also: Harvard votes to free its research

David Weinberger:

If we were today building a system for evaluating scholarly research and for making it maximally available, we would not build anything like the current paper-based system. Well, we are building such a system. The Harvard proposal will, in my opinion, help.

Boy Bedlam Blog:

If successful, the vote would be a monumental step, and I am of two minds regarding it. On the negative side — and I say this as an editor and a publisher — this is a further nail in the coffin of those who engage in discriminatory, critical selection: the editor as judge of critical thought and its transmission. The Harvard University seal would constitute the totality of validity for a work of scholarship: and that’s a fallacy. On the positive side, it is a continual sin that the un-institutionalized seeker of knowledge is financially barred from acquiring the latest, most advanced research: you need a university pass, after all, to access JSTOR, or else pay a very high entry fee for a service you would use relatively rarely.

The Times, ventriloquizing "The Publishing Industry:"

Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo.

Oh ho, those quiffy longhairs!

A commenter asks:

When will Harvard and other universities do the same for the TEACHING ACADEMICS? If the researchers must make their research papers open acccess, then it would be nice to see all of the professors who write books when they are paid by the univesity also make their books, lectue notes open access (dowloadable pdfs). What is good for the research faculty, is good for the teaching faculty!!