Culture Clash: Symbolic Capital and the Limits to Open Access Journal Growth in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Each year brings more open access peer-review journals to the humanities and social sciences. Yet despite this proliferation, for-profit publishers continue to dominate, and hold the most prestigious journals in their portfolios, pushing the tipping point imagined by open access advocates seemingly out of reach. This project examines the social life of academic publishing to better understand the obstacles preventing a more robust turn to open access, one that does not simply mean more journals, but one that sees the more prestigious journals opting for an open access platform. Drawing on the work of cultural sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, I examine social relations in the cultures of academic authors and open access advocates. While attention has been directed toward the importance of social status acquisition in the humanities and social sciences, I argue, open access initiatives too often fail to take this research into account, and, as a result, underestimate the durability of the social structures influencing author decisions when calling for a culture change in academic publishing. I also examines the culture of open access initiatives, to show how the composition of symbolic value within these projects can, at times, come to detract from the invitation they hope to extend to academia. Against a tendency to see academic publishing platforms as culture-less enterprises, I argue for a more reflexive approach, one that takes into account how contested conceptions of symbolic and cultural capital influence the decisions of authors and open access publishers. I conclude with a discussion possible changes to open access publishing, changes which may jump start the open access movement in the humanities and social sciences

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship (Promotional Flyer)

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. Staying true to the open access model: it is free to stream and download, for private or public use, and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone regardless of their social, financial or political background will have access

Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review

Within the context of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) research scope, this literature review investigates the current trends, advantages, disadvantages, problems and solutions, opportunities and barriers in Open Access Publishing (OAP), and in particular Open Access (OA) academic publishing. This study is intended to scope and evaluate current theory and practice concerning models for OAP and engage with intellectual, legal and economic perspectives on OAP. It is also aimed at mapping the field of academic publishing in the UK and abroad, drawing specifically upon the experiences of CREATe industry partners as well as other initiatives such as SSRN, open source software, and Creative Commons. As a final critical goal, this scoping study will identify any meaningful gaps in the relevant literature with a view to developing further research questions. The results of this scoping exercise will then be presented to relevant industry and academic partners at a workshop intended to assist in further developing the critical research questions pertinent to OAP

The Institutional Repository route to Open Access: implications for its evolution

Open access to peer reviewed journal articles is one of the key messages of the current global movement that is changing the paradigm of scholarly communication. Creating open access journals is one such route and creating institutional repositories containing author generated electronic text is another complementary alternative. In the UK, the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) programme of research is based on the vision of open access. Experiments in setting up an institutional repository for academic research output at the University of Southampton have emphasized that the institutional repository agenda is broader and that academic needs may dictate a more expanded database model than the pioneering discipline based e-Prints archive known as ‘arXiv’. The institution is represented by a broad range of publication types including, but not exclusively, peer reviewed journal articles and the different disciplines have evolved different recording practices. Full text deposits may provide the opportunity for added value elements – e.g. enhanced diagrams, additional data or presentations – if the database provides the capability. The repository may provide the building blocks for effective management of collaborative e-research. Academic institutions that impose research reporting in an institutional repository require full recording of publications including those where obtaining full text is difficult or inappropriate. A practical route is, therefore, to develop an institutional repository which is ’hybrid’ – containing both records and full text where achievable. In this scenario, the technical and management issues eg authentication and quality assurance of the metadata generation may become more complex. However, the full text element can grow as the practice becomes more natural within the recording process and as copyright restrictions ease. In the UK, several factors including the Research Assessment Exercise and citation impact measures based on increasing open access could also help encourage this change. The goal of providing open access to peer reviewed research items may, therefore, come about by a more circuitous but, in the end, more effective route. The ‘hybrid’ library will have evolved to the digital library of the ideal

Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open access will improve with more active involvement.

Lu Xiao provides a summary of her research on academic perceptions of Wikipedia and open access publishing. Survey results showed that researchers’ lack of experiences with Wikipedia and/or open access journals negatively affected their perceptions of the open access publishing model. Compared to tenure-track faculty members, instructors and ‘Other’ academic professionals are more likely to believe that academic publishing in Wikipedia will be more widely read and more timely. They are less likely to think that Wikipedia has “no advantage” over open-access journals

Indian Contribution to Open Access Scholarly Publishing: A Case Study of DOAJ

India has been a cradle of knowledge for thousands of years. Presently it has significant advantages in the 21st century knowledge race due to one of the largest higher education system in the world. It generates a lot of information in the form of research papers, project reports, books, conference papers, theses, dissertations, articles, and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to preserve, manage and make it accessible to the academic community in particular for sharing and visualizing their innovations for the betterment of society as a whole. The present study attempts to evaluate the initiatives taken by India to make this intellectual output accessible for all by publishing them in Open Access journals. The results revealed that India is continuously contributing in Open Access scholarly publishing as some of the premier institutions, particularly in the science and technology area, are providing open access to their research publications. The position of India in terms of number of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is 7th in the world, well ahead of countries such as China, Australia, and Japan

The Future of Open Access Journals in Academic Libraries: a Survey on Current Practices and a Blueprint for Collection Development (Survey Data)

Print journals collection development is a long-standing academic library role, whose support of university curriculum and research is essential. However, academic libraries have weathered difficult collection development decisions due to costs and strained budgets. As technology has given rise to online journals and space is reallocated, libraries have shifted focus to online journals. In addition, some academic libraries select open access journals to supplement subscriptions, but lack criteria. Furthermore, academic libraries are challenged by some open access journals’ predatory practices, unreliable access, and lacking peer review. This article explores academic libraries’ open access journals collection development and provides a blueprint