<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">This paragraph from an interview with the anthropologist Tim Ingold is also revealing of the fears created by Open Access in social sciences and humanities. In order to advance the Open Access movement, we have to understand these fears and misunderstandings and get prepared to answer them. The tradition of having scholarly societies funded by subscriptions to their journals is very strong in the "culture" of these domains where the sources of funding are very scarce... <div><p><i><strong>Antonio</strong>:</i> I see a sort of paradox when I
publish an article and then find myself legally unable to freely
disseminate it (due to copyright restrictions). What is your opinion on
“open access”?</p><p><i><strong>Tim</strong>: </i>On the face of it, open access looks
like an admirable principle to which we would all want to subscribe. But
the appearance is misleading, and the current call for open access is
in fact playing directly into the hands of government, large
corporations and predatory publishing houses, all of which must be
taking much delight in our academic gullibility. For anthropology, to
endorse open access unequivocally would be an own goal. Here’s why.
Whatever regime is in place, specialist academic publishing is an
extremely costly business. The question is whether these costs are borne
up front by the producers of research, or by its consumers (readers and
subscribers). Open access would shift the burden from the latter to the
former. With rare exceptions (for example where scholars might be
independently wealthy), these costs are way beyond what any individual
researcher could afford. For externally funded research projects, they
might be borne by the funding body (e.g., a research council). For
academics with permanent positions, they might be borne by their
universities. However, universities with limited resources would then
have to decide what work of their academics gets published and what does
not. In effect, managers and bureaucrats would find themselves in
charge of decisions currently taken by editors. As for all the scholars
who are not lucky enough to hold tenured positions, who may be in
between jobs or have no jobs at all, their work would have absolutely no
chance of being published, as they would have no means to pay. Not only
that, but the scholarly societies would find their subscription income
cut out from under them, and would probably be unable to continue. Yet
these societies have come to play a more and more crucial role as
protectors of disciplinary integrity and as a last line of defence
against corporate interests and government interference.</p><div><a href="http://allegralaboratory.net/interview-tim-ingold-on-the-future-of-academic-publishing/">http://allegralaboratory.net/interview-tim-ingold-on-the-future-of-academic-publishing/</a></div><div><br><div><div>Le 2014-01-23 à 08:04, Stevan Harnad a écrit :</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Roboto,arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">A very silly piece in <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1360491.ece">TLS</a> by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate in which -- despite noting that until at least 2020 HEFCE has not mandated OA for books, only for journal articles -- he decries shrilly the doom and gloom that the HEFCE mandate portends for book-based humanity scholarship. The gratuitous cavilling is, as usual, cloaked in shrill alarums about academic freedom infringement...</span><br>
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