As many of you will have seen by now, it looks like Elsevier -- not content with taking down papers from academia.edu -- is now also issuing takedown notices to individual universities. Nicole Wyatt, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary, reported on having received such a notice in comments here. The Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, from which I had learned about the academia.edu takedown, also reported on the note received by the University of Calgary and passed on to all their staff. (Btw, did they go after other universities as well? Or is it a case of ‘pilot harassment’, as well described by the SV-POW site? So far I only know of occurrences with Calgary.)
If anyone was still looking for reasons to boycott Elsevier, this is clearly a good one. Of course, it is not too difficult for most philosophers to boycott Elsevier, who does not publish major philosophy journals. But Elsevier is very strong in some adjacent areas, psychology in particular; it publishes for example the flagship journal Cognition, where a number of philosophers have published.
The question to be asked is: why is it that we academics still put up with such absurd behavior by (some, though not all) academic publishers? Here, I want to suggest that again we are dealing with the phenomenon of academic journals as brands, which I wrote about last week. In philosophy as well as in other disciplines, journal publications still play a tremendously influential role in hiring processes, tenure cases etc. These academic publishers are the brand-owners, and as the discipline is still largely regulated by reliance on these brands, we cannot for now do without them. But as I learned from this blog post at Language Log, especially in the comments section, there is significant variability among disciplines regarding the position that journals occupy. In physics, for example, they are much less prominent, and this almost exclusively as a result of arXiv and the widespread habit of posting preprints. (H/T to Kenny Easwaran for the LL blog post.)
It is of course unreasonable to expect that philosophy (or any other discipline) will change its evaluative mechanisms and its patterns of scientific communication from one day to another. I also do not want to give the impression that I am against all and any journal: I’m an editor for two journals, one of which open access; I fulfill my usual refereeing duties, occasionally even for journals published by one of the ‘ill-behaved’ publishers (not Elsevier, though); and of course, I publish in journals myself. I am just pointing out that the reason we academics put up with bad behavior by (some) academic publishers is because we think we need them, in particular for quality control; all I’m saying is, we don’t.
Recent Comments