| This paragraph from an interview with the anthropologist Tim Ingold is also revealing of the fears created by Open Access in social sciences and humanities. In order to advance the Open Access movement, we have to understand these fears and misunderstandings and get prepared to answer them. The tradition of having scholarly societies funded by subscriptions to their journals is very strong in the "culture" of these domains where the sources of funding are very scarce... Antonio: I see a sort of paradox when I publish an article and then find myself legally unable to freely disseminate it (due to copyright restrictions). What is your opinion on “open access”? Tim: On the face of it, open access looks like an admirable principle to which we would all want to subscribe. But the appearance is misleading, and the current call for open access is in fact playing directly into the hands of government, large corporations and predatory publishing houses, all of which must be taking much delight in our academic gullibility. For anthropology, to endorse open access unequivocally would be an own goal. Here’s why. Whatever regime is in place, specialist academic publishing is an extremely costly business. The question is whether these costs are borne up front by the producers of research, or by its consumers (readers and subscribers). Open access would shift the burden from the latter to the former. With rare exceptions (for example where scholars might be independently wealthy), these costs are way beyond what any individual researcher could afford. For externally funded research projects, they might be borne by the funding body (e.g., a research council). For academics with permanent positions, they might be borne by their universities. However, universities with limited resources would then have to decide what work of their academics gets published and what does not. In effect, managers and bureaucrats would find themselves in charge of decisions currently taken by editors. As for all the scholars who are not lucky enough to hold tenured positions, who may be in between jobs or have no jobs at all, their work would have absolutely no chance of being published, as they would have no means to pay. Not only that, but the scholarly societies would find their subscription income cut out from under them, and would probably be unable to continue. Yet these societies have come to play a more and more crucial role as protectors of disciplinary integrity and as a last line of defence against corporate interests and government interference. Le 2014-01-23 à 08:04, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
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