Prestige and Open-Access Publishing...

I thought I'd jump right in and do my post for this block of time early. I was really fascinated by Aaron's assertion yesterday that publishing in online journals doesn't (at least in his field) carry the same prestige as publishing in print journals. First, because Dr. Rouzie and I had just had the same conversation yesterday, except that Dr. Rouzie reassured me that the real differentiation, at least in Rhet/Comp, was the peer review process and not the medium. So I imagine there is some significant difference among disciplines on this issue.

However, I'm very interested in the potential impact of Harvard's recent open letter on the cost and limitations of publishing to non-open access journals. In this "Faculty Advisory Memorandum on Journal Pricing," Harvard urges several fairly radical moves with a variety of potential outcomes. Here are the action steps listed in the letter (F = Faculty and Students, L = Libraries):

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F).

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F).

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).

4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues (F).

5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations (F).

6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options (F).

7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals (L).

8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system, (L).

9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public (L).

First, it's important to point out that while items 1-6 might indeed be moves toward making scholarly writing more widely available, items 7-9 might actually reduce access to scholarly writing in smaller fields that produce low-use journals. They might, in fact, cause such journals to cease to exist! But, having acknowledged this danger (and believing, in my rose-colored-glasses sort of way that the scholarly pursuits of smaller fields will find their way into academic literature even if there is an upset in the current journal structure), I want to look at a few key elements of the first six action items.

I believe that the second action item is the most significant for the future of open access journals, though others are more significant to academic publishing in general. It suggests that faculty--at least faculty at Harvard--can indeed shift "prestige," that nebulous word that haunts P&T Files, from established print journals to open access, online journals by choosing to publish their work in the latter. According to Harvard's Open Access Policies, "Research has repeatedly shown that articles available freely online are more often cited and have greater impact than those not freely available, and this trend is increasing over time." Taken together, these arguments, you can increase the prestige of open access electronic journals by publishing in them and publishing in open access electronic journals will increase the prestige of your work by making it more likely that other scholars will cite it, suggest greater agency in determining the "prestige" of certain publication venues and their usefulness than I think most graduate student and faculty believe themselves to possess. How much is this an artifact of the prestige of being a faculty member or graduate student at Harvard, and how does it translate for those of us working in (really fabulous, truly wonderful, but most assuredly non-Ivy) colleges and universities? Does this agency rest equally with "celebufaculty," tenured faculty at institutions below the Research 1 designation, non-tenured faculty, contingent faculty, and graduate students? (Obviously not.) Do those of us in less privileged positions need to wait for those in more privileged positions to "blaze the trail" by publishing in currently-less-prestigious journals until this "prestige shift" has been realized? What are the risks to us if we don't?

Here is language from "A Model Open-Access Policy" offered for use at other universities:

The Faculty of (university name) is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to (university name) permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to (university name) a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same.

What does this move to grant the university at which we are producing our work the right to "exercise the copyright in those articles" and in addition, that we would be compelled to "authorize others to do the same?"

I can't speak to what this means for scholarly writers, but I can speak to what it would mean to creative writers working within the academy if our creative works were to be included under the umbrella of scholarly writing by virtue of our being academicians. (And, as someone who just went through the fight to permanently embargo her MFA thesis, this is not a clearly drawn line. In addition, several literary journals are currently available through JSTOR or Project Muse.) Publishers do not want books, or for the most part essays, short stories, and poems for anthologies, which are also freely available online. And publishing books is critical to the job search and tenure process for creative writing faculty. I imagine this is true, if not equally true, for faculty in other fields.

This is not to say that I'm arguing against moving to open access for all scholarly works, even those that might fall into the category of creative works generated by academicians. I am, however, interested in the intersection of privilege as embodied by Harvard, the "information wants to be free" ethic of the early internet (and of which I am still a HUGE proponent), and the individual risks and costs to faculty and graduate students who make the move to open access publishing before the academy and its hiring and tenuring processes have caught up to this shift.

I'm very interested in your thoughts!

Works Cited:

"Faculty Advisory Memorandum on Journal Pricing." The Harvard Library Transition. Harvard University, 17 04 2012. Web. 25 Apr 2012.

"Open Access Policies." Office for Scholarly Communication. Harvard University, n.d. Web. 25 Apr 2012.

Shieber, Stuart. "A Model Open-Access Policy." Office for Scholarly Communication. Harvard University, n.d. Web. 25 Apr 2012.