Has the movement for open access in publishing reached a milestone?
As you probably know, Arcade is a venture in open-access publishing, which means we make our content available for free to everyone. We are allied with the Public Knowledge Project, which has pioneered the distribution of software to bring open access to scholarship in many disciplines, countries, and languages.
Those of us committed to open access look for signs that our values are gaining momentum, and in the past few years, there have been many. The rapacity of some commercial publishers who own scholarly journals has only helped. It is often remarked that something is wrong with a system that collects scholarship from its producers (that is, scholars) for free, and sells it back to their institutions at sometimes exorbitant rates.
This week the Harvard Library, through its Faculty Advisory Council, issued a statement that deserves attention. The statement noted the cost to Harvard of maintaining subscriptions to conventional journals, now nearly $3.75 million per year, and urged the faculty to support open access. We hope and expect that statements like this will be seen more often in the coming months and years. And we would like to suppose that they might provoke a new round of investment—not only of funds, but of time and commitment—in ventures like Arcade and its journals.
When we conceived Arcade, several of us on the Stanford faculty imagined what we could build if for one year we took all the time and thought that we, as authors and reviewers, give to conventional publishers, including university presses as well as journals, and did something else with them. We imagined: what if we put all that effort into a single venture that would reflect our values? That's what we tried to do.
I'll use this space occasionally to draw attention to new developments on this topic.
Indeed: what would happen if our intellectual energies was not spent running the obstacles course of trying to publish in the close circle of a few peer-reviewed journals that 1) take often several years, at least in the humanities, to get our works out in the world 2) charge our libraries, students and colleagues astronomical fees for access to research they got for free and often barely edited 3) prevent the open circulation of ideas and create a two-tier system where independent scholars, less endowed libraries, educational institutions and countries are penalized.
Robert Darnton had eloquent words about this phenomenon, and what it means for the future of libraries, reading, and the ideal of knowledge as a common heritage of humanity. The question is: what policies and political strategy can we collectively use to force publishers to agree to change the current system?
The irony is that as long as we publish in those journals and request our libraries to subscribe to them, we (academics) are also part of the problem. How can we part of the solution? Since we are at once labor and consumers, we could exert leverage at two essential sites of the system (production and demand), but any action needs to be collective to be efficient.