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Commodification, the Academic Journal Racket and the Digital Commons
David, my erstwhile ‘parasitic overlord’ from when I was co-editing Millennium, points me to some posts by Kent Anderson of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, who defends the industry on a number of...
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Academia in the Age of Digital Reproduction; Or, the Journal System, Redeemed
It took at least 200 years for the novel to emerge as an expressive form after the invention of the printing press. So said Bob Stein in an interesting roundtable on the digital university from back...
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Death To Open Access! Long Live Open Access!
A few weeks ago at the Millennium conference, some of us got together to talk about open access and the political economy of knowledge (re)production in our little corner of academia (“us” being Colin...
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Open Access: News and Reflections from the ACSS Conference
Last week, the first big public event discussing the Open Access policy announced in July was held at the Royal Statistical Society by the Academy of Social Sciences. If you are interested, many of the...
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Open Access: HEFCE, REF2020 and the Threat to Academic Freedom
This is the text of a document prepared by Meera and me on Article Processing Charges as currently understood and the serious risks we think they pose to academic freedom and funding, broadly...
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Getting Somewhere: HEFCE Proposals on Open Access for a Post-2014 Research...
This week, the UK’s Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) published their formal proposals for including an open access requirement in any post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF)....
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HEFCE, the REF, Open Access and Journals in Politics, IR and Political Theory
A guest post from Lee Jones, providing some much needed concrete detail on journal open access policies. Lee is Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Director of Research at the School of...
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Why Metrics Cannot Measure Research Quality: A Response to the HEFCE...
Update 24th June: 7,500+ views, 100s of shares, 200+ signatories! And a new post with some responses to further issues raised. The Higher Education Funding Council for England are reviewing the idea...
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Metrics: An Addendum on RAE / REF
We have had overwhelming support from a wide range of academics for our paper on why metrics are inappropriate for assessing research quality (200+ as of June 22nd). However, some have also posed...
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Can Metrics Be Used Responsibly? Why Structural Conditions Push Against This
Not waving, exactly, but… Today, the long-awaited ‘Metric Tide’ report from the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management was published, along with appendices...
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