The Inaccessibility of Academic Research
I strongly recommend Laura McKenna‘s piece on the wall that separates the general public from academic research:
Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public — which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system — has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription costs. Newspapers and think tanks, which could help extend research into the public sphere, are denied free access to the material. Faculty members are rightly bitter that their years of work reaches an audience of a handful, while every year, 150 million attempts to read JSTOR content are denied every year.
And this is true even though writers of academic articles aren’t directly compensated. It is indeed a system that needs to be fundamentally rethought.
Good god, this is so true. As a language teacher, it would be extremely useful to have access to research into teaching methods so I could improve my skills. My school is cheap and refuses to spend money on any of that, so I’m stuck.
Universities in Japan have a nice catch-22 in that you need 3 published papers to get hired, but getting those papers published often requires the resources provided by a university, specifically access to JSTOR, etc.
On the upside, languishing in a private school like this one has given me a new appreciation for unions and makes me wish we were organized.
I miss Lexis/Nexis.
Well, NIH was really pushing this because as you may know the (COMPETES act?) says you have to deposit your NIH-funded article in the free PubMed Central database, and now Caroline Maloney (D-Elsevier) and maybe Issa (R-endless list) think that this puts publishers at risk, so they are going to kill it (the Research Works Act). Infuriating.
See:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=846
Well into my Medicare tour, I am fortunate to live near a large university library where I can access medical journals. There is a wealth of information in them about my various real and imagined ills.
The subscription rates for these journals are prohibitive for individuals.
Not just individuals. I occasionally used the library at Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA) and they had astronomical and technical journals I had never even heard of. Many of them had four-figure subscription rates, and were likely printed in runs of less than 100.
And it’s also true that the peer reviewers aren’t directly compensated. So if the two most important cogs in the system don’t get paid… it is hard to understand where the money goes. Is typesetting really this valuable? Obviously you need an editor and some staff to distribute copies for review and harass said reviewers when they are late… but it still doesn’t make much sense.
At least in mathematics, the journals don’t even do that much — they just send along a style file to apply to the researcher’s paper (which has been conveniently put together in LaTeX), and you send them the finished PDF. Those publishers are basically charging $1000/year for their compilation skills.
And peer reviewers aren’t even indirectly compensated, really; doing it has a trivial-to-nonexistent effect on tenure and promotion decisions at most institutions.
Then why do they do it?
Service to the profession, plus the occasional chance to be petty and vindictive.
Occasional?
I thought the whole point of peer review was to subtly undermine your colleagues.
The Marines used to call such peer reviews among officer candidates “fuck your buddy time”.
My organization has a policy of honoring “page charges”. We pay journals to print our papers, then pay subscription fees so we can read them.
They really should dump the idea of putting these things on paper. It’s just expense. Even people who want hard copy don’t read from the juornals themselves. They have their students photocopy what they want.
Very true, but there’s at least one local library that allows cardholders access to JSTOR. Any resident of California can get a card from the San Francisco Public Library, and that’s how I access JSTOR when I don’t have time to go to UCLA or Cal State Northridge to access it.
In philosophy there are at least 2 well regarded online journals that are independent of the publishing vampires and their editorial boards are full of prominent philosophers. Maybe this could be a blueprint for other disciplines too.
Links
if interested google journal of ethics and social philosophy and philosopher’s imprint.
It’s kind of odd that the piece doesn’t mention Aaron Schwartz.
And it’s also odd that I can’t spell Aaron Swartz.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit; one lingering problem is that many/most academic journals are near-incomprehensible to non-specialists anyway. I used to be pretty good at math (for example) back in the day, but I can only barely make heads/tails out of academic math journals (I am fortunate that I have a mathematician friend whom I can consult to explain things).
As for peer reviewers getting paid, it might have “trivial-to-nonexistent effect on tenure and promotion decisions” but it sure makes you look like you’re in the club (possibly because you are), which has residual benefits.
Unaddressed is also the problem that you have to already be in the club to play [publish] — that is, I could be the best and brilliantist [sic] nondegreed freelance researcher in the universe, but most journals (in any subject/discipline) won’t publish me if I don’t have a PhD.
Access is of course really the point of the article, and is a huge problem too. Why can’t JSTOR be free or at least affordable? I sure miss that perk of being affiliated with an institution.
So what’s the solution? I toyed seriously with the idea of starting a free, online, anyone-can-submit (or maybe publish?) research, alternative music journal. But for what? To get my own ideas out there? As a forum for grad students who can’t crack the major music theory/musicology journals? To stick it to the field from which I walked away?
Summary: Specialization is useful and important, but leads to some unfortunate residual effects. Also, academia is (as is often pointed out on this blog) a sucker’s bet.*
*Unless you’re a scientist
Holy christ; not an “alternative music” journal; an alternative “music journal.”
Fucking ambiguous language.
That’s a huge part of the problem. Universities have gradually morphed into ferociously protective fiefdom/guilds. Think of the explosion of knowledge produced by Victorian autodidacts, and realize that today they couldn’t even get in the door. That’s shameful.
I don’t know that this is true. Colin McGinn is one of the most respected philosophers of mind in the world, and he has “only” a BA. Hell, Saul Kripke is probably *the* most respected philosopher period and he has “only” a BA.
Not that long ago a Ph.D. wasn’t completely necessary to get to the top of an academic field. Today that’s no longer true.
Kripke was born in 1940; McGinn in 1950, which is a little later than I would have expected given what you say. But even in the 1960s a terminal degree wasn’t a doctorate in every field, and even in philosophy I think you could get an academic job — and thus entrance into the academic publication world — with a “lesser” degree, depending on the circumstances.
Okay. It you believe that, then try to get even a phenomenally knowledgeable autodidact into a graduate degree program at a reputable school sometime. Good luck with that: the gatekeeping is not based on knowledge or suitability it’s based on having paid the right money to the right schools for the right paper. Recognizing academic work is necessary for universities; recognizing ONLY academic work is a guild.
Anecdotal example: A legal colleague of mine was refused such entry to a history MA program. The responsible professors candidly admitted that his knowledge in his subject field (20thC military history) was good enough to “walk into a course and teach it right now”, but the admissions committee demanded that this man with 20+ years of independent study and a law degree go back and take a year of full-time undergraduate courses before they’d even consider him. From (again anecdotal) evidence that’s fairly typical.
Publishing in journals was the original topic.
In any case, admission to graduate programs is first constrained not at the departmental level, but at the central graduate school level, where bureaucratic mindsets abound. I could imagine it was the GS at the school you describe that made the requirement of UG courses. They might possibly have had anti-old boy network policies in mind, or simply turf wars: “we don’t care who you say he is; we make the rules here.”
But it might have been at the department level and personal insecurity is not unknown in academia. But in my experience it’s bureaucracy or personal insecurity that explains most of these things, not some sense of a professional guild to be protected.
Not that those two explanations are incompatible; the latter is something of a functionalist re-description of the effects of the former.
In any case, it’s often remarked within the academy that credentials are less respected the harder the science, so that you really could walk in off the street and blow some mathematicians away and they’d be completely cool with that, whereas the humanities are more insecure and hence more credentials focused.
That is very astute of you. He was nominated by one prof, had a recommendation from one of the top historians in the country, and the chair of the history department personally walked his application over to the graduate admissions committee (which governs all grad admissions and not just by individual department). In the end, though, motive is irrelevant to my point, which is that universities tend to function as guilds who refuse to recognize or encourage education that doesn’t originate with them. Whether they do so for bureaucratic or academic or financial reasons is moot: they do it.
I can agree with that.
However — and I’m not trying to be persnickety, but this difference counts and may be the fault line along which reform can insinuate itself — and I haven’t worked all this out, just trying to make sense of it myself as we go along — journals, learned societies, conferences, and so on are run by organizations organized along disciplinary lines, not university lines. A typical journal, for instance, has editors or reviewers from many different universities, but they’re all mathematicians or philosophers or biologists. (There are exceptions to this in the form of in-house journals like the Journal of Philosophy, run by Columbia’s phil dept. But they are exceptions.)
Okay, now that I’ve typed that, I’m not sure where I’m going with it. It might be important or not when discussing gate-keeping for publication / presentation.
Another angle: a properly run double-blind review system for a journal or a conference or a book series prevents the editorial editor and the reviewer from knowing the identity of the author. So there wouldn’t be the possibility of credential-checking here; only the quality of the work counts. And that is true: when I review under those conditions I honestly don’t know the name of the author, though in the age of Google I guess I could look for themes, terms, style in web-available work. (In any case, there’s a well-known letterhead prestige factor, as well as gender and racial bias factors, that are internal to the guild and that double-blind systems are trying to eliminate.)
The real problem is the training necessary to do the quality work; getting personal attention and a program of study helping you decide what to read in what order is really hard to do independently. And the training is done in universities. So while in principle credentials don’t enter into gate-keeping for publications and presentations, so auto-didacts could in principle publish in the journals for which I referee, in practice a university course of study is very likely to be a necessary condition of the training necessary to produce work of sufficient quality to pass blind review.
Back to the intent question: the above system produces results in the disciplinary organizations and their journals and conferences that reinforces the guild aspects of the university system, even if the disciplinary organizations are not identical to the university systems almost all their members belong to.
I am an amateur non-academic. Two weeks ago, I voluntarily went down to half-time on my job, in part to write an academic article for peer review on a subject that I think is an important public good (voting reform). So, in order to write this article, I will be foregoing thousands of dollars in wages, and spending about a thousand dollars to carry out the research involved.
In my citation database, I already have over 50 articles I plan to footnote. I happen to be lucky in that, even though I live in Guatemala, I still have a valid account at my old college, through which I can get these articles. If not, I would be paying several dollars apiece; those hundreds of dollars of expenses would not be something I could really afford.
And then, once I publish it, I will have the choice of whether to spend 2-3 thousand dollars extra in order to make it freely available to others. I will be soliciting donations for that expense, but I certainly feel that it’s a cruel joke at that point. Free access that isn’t free.
I understand that journals need to meet their expenses somehow. But clearly, since they are meeting those expenses today, the money is there. We just have to find a way for them to get that money without having to take the information hostage to do it.
ps. actually, my account at my former institution is only really valid in that it works. But anyone who reads this would have to be lower than a worm to rat me out.
Journal publications are far too slow to keep up with research. The real action is in preprints.
Allow me to direct your attention to the only and only xxx site that you’ll find in a “.gov” domain:
xxx.lanl.gov
While it’s completely open to the public, there’s still that whole “drinking from the firehose” problem.
This is being addressed, at least in the humanities, with the whole digital movement, a key part of which is alternate/open paths for publication. What needs to change is the attitude in academic departments towards tenure. Publishing in something other than the usual suspect journals needs to be acceptable for job security as well.
Yes, this is a key point. The problem is that open access journals tend to be new ones, and prestige accrues to old journals. Balancing factors include the prestige of the editors, the citation or impact factor, and the acceptance rates of the OA journals. If the former 2 are high and the latter one is low, then someone on a PT committee can argue that the journal in question is worth as much as an older one. So as long as the OA journal is blind review, with prestige editors, a good impact factor, and low acceptance rates, then it shouldn’t hurt the candidate.
I ain’t know if you all have seen this, but an obliquely related topic yesterday at ObWi:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2012/01/friends-dont-let-friends.html
I normally don’t comment here, but I’m an academic librarian and I spend a lot of time thinking about this. The Copyright Librarian at UMN did a great post on the inaccuracies in this article. I think most academic librarians are in agreement here, but please, let’s get the details right.
Thanks, that’s a very good corrective you link to! As it says, the villains are Elsevier and Springer, not JSTOR.