dailypennsylvanian.com — As costs rise, library cuts journals :
As research libraries across the nation decry price increases, Penn’s library system is calling for reform through its “Winning Independence” Web site.
Linked to the library system’s Web site this September, the site encourages professors to be active on journals’ editorial boards and to push for fair pricing policies.
I am glad to see that Penn is openly advocating the Open Access Movement. In fact, I am glad to see that the Movement has gathered enough momentum to be capitalized.
They raise some good points. Science, technical and medical journals are starting to crowd out the other disciplines.
Ah, yet another initiative to, well, return to the good old days. If those days were so good, how come we have abandonned them? What was it that gave Elsevier and its ilk its enormous grip on the market for “scientific publications”.
Clearly they provided a much-eeded service, at a time when the world that was interested in reading scientific discourse was becoming more interconnected. Unfortunately for them, it seems we’ve become so interconnected that their channel no longer plays the same social role.
You can ask a similar question about the railroad industry: We “moved back” to people choosing where and when to travel — and away from collective routed coordinated mass transport — between the 1920s and the 1950s (in the US). The railroad solved a problem, but soon the culture found an alternative more appealing.
Weren’t academic journals the prototype of interconnectedness? I seem to remember reading stories about the troubles the renaissance scientists went through simply to be heard.
Academic journals always struck me as being a sort of fanzines, with a widely dispersed, highly specialized and interested audience. I don’t see how that provides fertile ground for commercial publishers.