The Weight of Inertia
Dorothea Salo has another post on her work promoting open access journals, expressing some frustration at the lack of enthusiasm she’s been getting from faculty:
Faculty aren’t [excited]. I call them “the slumbering behemoth†for a reason. Sure, they ought to give a damn who owns their stuff. They don’t, or they think wrongly that they own it. I forgot that.
The problem here is actually really, really, deep. Let me summarize it like this:
Publish or perish, the old mantra goes. But it’s not that simple; one’s promotion, salary, and tenure are typically not just conditioned on whether you publish, but where. In other words, a rigorous peer review process and some objective measure of a publishing outlet’s level of respect in the field are a crucial marker of the quality of one’s work. In turn, the “objective measures” that Deans and promotion committees wish to see come exclusively from big vendors (like Thompson’s), who themselves are fully dependent on other large organization: the publishers.
So for me, it’s not that I don’t care about who owns my work, or that I’m under some illusions that I in fact do. It’s that I recognize just how big the structural weight of inertia is to change things. We actually have an open access journal in my field, but while I review articles for them, I would be unlikely anytime soon to submit my own work there, simply because I cannot be sure it will be recognized.
Likewise, technically speaking, I have the skills to have created a nicely-typeset PDF version of my book, available for any and all to access (well, assuming I could get rights from the publishers of previously issues journal content!). But I went with a major publisher. Why? Because it would have been career suicide not to.
In a world of Web 2.0, social networking, WikiPedia, and so forth, it’s really surprising just how much inertia there is in academia!
I and WordPress missed Dorothea’s response awhile back. For the record, I know she totally “gets” this stuff. My post was not in any way a critique of her’s; more just reflecting on the issues she’s been raising from where I stand, and hoping we can see some progress on this front.
Now, I need to figure out what my rights are to self-host!