Scholarly Publishing Discussion Questions

I was extremely fortunate to have taken Dorothea’s LIS 855: Publishing, Knowledge Institutions, and Society: E-Revolutions? course this past summer and have a lot of resources in regards to scholarly-journal publishing and scholarly monograph and eBook publishing. The following are some questions or other consideration which should be taken into account when discussing scholarly publishing.

1) Van Noorden and Willinsky discuss in-depth the positive and negative aspects of open access publishing. One major aspect is the peer-reviewed and pay-per-publishing model of open access. However, these articles seem to neglect the different levels of open access. Peter Suber, of the Harvard Open Access Project discusses four different types of open access on his website here:

Gold: provides open access to its peer-reviewed manuscripts in OA repositories

Green: permits authors to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in OA repositories

Pale Green: Permits preprint archiving by authors

Gray: None of the above

Does this tiered model of open access create more opportunities for authors from various disciplines to publish through various methods, or does the creation of confusing system in which academic authors are more likely to be duped as illustrated in the Stratford article?

2) Both the Crewe and Fitzpatrick article discuss how open access scholarly publishing makes academic publishing more accessible to the “general” or “average” reader, an important group within the scholarly publishing community to supplement the economic costs. However, does creating access via the Internet intrinsically create higher access to the “average” reader? What variables on the online, scholarly publishing side and the “average” reader’s side create or limit access? How do libraries fit in as Fitzpatrick states, “The library is such a model would become not simply a repository, but instead fully part of a communications circuit that facilitates discourse rather than enforcing silence” (p. 108)?

3) Willinsky describes the triple-sided economy of the transition to digital journal editions. They include:

           

1. Publisher continues to employ the traditional industrial apparatus of print, even as manuscripts are prepared and managed electronically

2. Publishers are developing sophisticated Web-based systems for publishing, distributing, and indexing electronic editions

3. Libraries have developed no less sophisticated technical infrastructures for providing their patrons with access to these and other digital resources (p. 10)

What changes to this economic structure could be made to promote the use of digital journals? How much of an affect do you think open access journals have in the public education sphere?