Editing and refereeing for journals is a thank-less job that you don’t get paid for. Editors and referees do this out of the goodness of their heart. So it’s weird to have a publishing company make money off of this labor. At one time they could justify the charge because they were the only way to get this research circulated.
However, the internet has changed all of that. Publishing companies are unnecessary. If editors and referees are going to work for free, then it makes much more sense to have the research posted online for free. Philosophers’ Imprint already does this, and they have an excellent mission statement defending open access journals. This is a very high quality journal and it’s free to the world. I like that. I hope that most philosophy journals go this route.
Harvard’s faculty recently voted to post all of their research online so that it would be freely available to the public. This is a noble gesture, and it sort of fits with the mission of journals like Philosophers’ Imprint.
For that reason, I admire what the professors at Harvard are trying to acheive, but the article suggests that research will get published (and counted as research) without peer review screening. Ironically, publishers are criticizing Harvard on the grounds that this risks lowering the quality of the research, but (of course) the publishers are wrong in assuming that you need publishers to have the kind of peer review that would ensure higher quality research. Again, see Philosophers’ Imprint.
Of course Harvard probably can’t shift the publication of their faculty’s research to online in peer review online journals all at once. There probably aren’t enough of those journals out there, but I can feel the revolution coming. I hope that Harvard’s move here will help push peer reviewed research into free online journals like Philosophers’ Imprint. All we need now are some qualified scholars to start more of these open access and peer-reviewed journals.
(hint, hint…Harvard.)
I read the NYT article on this and it too suggested that “finished” papers by Harvard faculty would be posted on this open access site. The authors would still be free to submit it to the journal of their choice.
This worries me. Mostly because if any part of academia is going to seep into the popular media, it will be what is most accessible. That puts this Harvard repository at the top of the pile. Since the papers that end up there are just “finished” versions the standard of paper in the database will inevitably be of a lower standard (on average). So, chances are higher that what ends up seeping into the popular media will be of a lower quality than it could be if we had a lot more open source journals.
That seems right. I hadn’t even thought about that.