ArsTechnica has a timely write-up regarding the state of public access publishing. I mentioned the burgeoning ‘open-access‘ movement in my University article and think it deserves some more attention.
What exactly consumes the relatively high prices for maintaining a journal? What is the specific breakdown of funds? How much do the various editors, referees and publishers get paid? In other words, where does all the bling go and just as important: are these barriers artificially erected to insulate the academy from outside competition?
And while I sympathize with the “information wants to be free” crowd, perhaps in the age of instant, collaborative publishing, the entire peer-review business model should be rethought — because it is a business model and is not immune to the economic laws of scarcity (i.e. everyone involved in the review process has limited resources).
News.com has a great write-up of how “Web 2.0″ is changing communication and collaboration in corporate America. Two of the tools being used for both internal and external communication are the weblog and wiki.
If large bureaucratic companies are capable of using these services, what is preventing academia from doing so? In fact, the current double-blind system could still be used by instituting anonymous universal names for each party. For instance, an author or group of authors could post their research on a private wiki maintained by the journal’s editorial board whom in turn assign referee’s to the nameless research. Edits could be automatically tracked by the software (try Wikipedia sometime to see this feature work) and the “Talk” feature could be enabled to allow participants to discuss the issue in detail.
Anyways, that is just one of many ways of reforming the model in a reasonably inexpensive manner. With any luck these technologies will continue to allow academia to have a valuable influence in the “Real-World” and reform the image that it is merely a collusive racket that perpetuates nonsensical gobbledygook (i.e. arguments in a vacuum or in an Ivory Tower).
For the record: in the long run I think that the emergent participatory information and content management systems which are being used by sites such as Digg will, in the words of Stephen Carson, eliminate the gatekeepers entirely.