humanitarian.info

I’m on the editorial board of a new journal, the first issue of which will be published in January 2009; the International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (IJISCRAM – snappy title, I know). I’ve also contributed an article to the first issue of the journal, and so a few weeks ago I received a copyright release form from the publishers of the journal.

It was only then that I realised just how much of a problem I have with this model of academic publishing.

Signing the form entailed giving up my copyright – not just the publishing rights but the entire kit and caboodle. In my other life I write a bit, and if somebody put that in front of me, I’d tell them to stick it up their jack royal. I explained my concerns to Murray Jennex, one of the IJISCRAM editors, who replied quite promptly with some good points which I hadn’t thought about before.

There is a cost for paper publication that ISCRAM would have to pick up. Also, pure electronic publication has a cost also to host and protect. Look at the problems that the Journal of the Association for Information Systems has had the last several months with security and hackers and they have had to spend a great deal to get their journal site open and keep it open. Another option is to charge authors to publish their work. JITCA does this and Miltidias in Greece is doing this with his open journal approach. Unfortunately this is also subtly against the stated mission of IJISCRAM as we are trying to put out a venue that will help academics attain tenure.

Although it’s not central to my issues with the copyright question, the question of academic tenure is definitely part of my concern. I’m not an academic and as a result I’m not concerned about tenure; so why should I support a mission that involves that, if it goes against my primary reason for supporting the publication – which is to provide a platform for the dissemination of research on information management for disaster response? Murray’s argument is that “free” journals (in the sense of being open) are not taken seriously by the academic community yet, but clearly the two goals are not in violent opposition to each other.

AIS publishes their journals free to AIS members, however, they also charge around $120 a year for membership from members in developed countries, less for those from under developed countries. Would ISCRAM members be willing to pay every year? Could we earn enough in subscriptions to support IJISCRAM? If we could, who would pay the initial cost to start the journal and more importantly, who would do all this manager work to find a printer and get the mailing out etc.? So the question is, how do we balance the desire for low cost journals so less developed countries can afford them or get them for free with the hard economic reality of paying to publish them?… My only answer is to have 2 journals, one a solid academic one, and the other a free electronic one with much less rigid rigor that can be disseminated for free or very low cost. I’m not sure we can support both and I’m not sure what the right answer is…

I’m not sure either. What I am sure of is that the current model fails in two specific ways. First, the proprietary publishing model will inevitably be steamrollered by the more open ecosystems that the Web has created – people (including myself) simply won’t bother to wait for the review and publishing process to grind slowly on simply in order to get their name in print. The web has already begun to choke this massively anachronistic process to death – it’s clearly just a hangover from the early enlightenment with some electricity shot through it by the industrial revolution – but it’s particularly ironic given that the specific topic of the journal is how to take advantage of the revolutionary aspects of new technology.

Second, the subscription model simply doesn’t ensure access to our work beyond the usual suspects. Academic publishing is strangely like poetry in that respect; the majority of journals are purchased by exactly the same people that are seeking publication in them. The people that we need to reach out to – in the case of journals such as IJISCAM, which really is about the problem sciences that I refer to in my article – are not subscribers, may not even be at university, probably don’t even know how to access this journal even if they know it exists. Why do we carry out research and write articles? If the answer is “to get tenure” then this model works just fine – but if we want to have any sort of impact then this model achieves the exact opposite.

In the end I signed the copyright release – I want the journal to succeed, and I’m prepared to break the agreement if necessary (gosh, I’m such an outlaw). I’ll continue to press this through discussions with the editorial board, and hope for change. The question is – given my position on copyright (I think it should remain solely with authors, who should encourage each other to open it up as much as possible under creative commons style licensing) can I in good conscience ask other authors to sign a similar agreement? And should I have signed that agreement myself, or have I betrayed the very principles which I’m trying to promote?