Report | Untangling Academic Publishing
A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research
This briefing paper aims
to provide a historical perspective that can inform the debates about what the
future of academic publishing should look like.We argue that current policy
regarding open access publishing, and many of the other proposals for the
reform of academic publishing, have been too focused on the opportunities and
financial challenges of the most recent changes in digital communications
technologies and have given undue weight to commercial concerns.
The key themes of this briefing paper are:
•
the business of academic
publishing
•
the role of publishing in
academic careers
•
and the tangled and
changing relationship between them.
The new digital
technologies offer the academic community the opportunity for low-cost digital
circulation of knowledge on a global scale.But academic engagement with these
new possibilities has so far been constrained in two ways:
By the institutional culture of academia, where the emphasis on
prestige rewards academics as
authors for engaging in traditional forms of academic publishing,
many of which are controlled
by commercially-motivated firms;
And by the lack of credible,
prestige-generating alternatives to those offered by the big commercial firms
and their imitators.Even non-profit scholarly publishers have tended to see
online publishing as a valuable income stream, rather than seeking ways to use
the potential of the Internet to carry out their traditional ideals of
promoting the circulation of knowledge.
Report PDF Link | https://zenodo.org/record/546100/files/UntanglingAcPub.pdf
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Event | MANLIBNET 17th
Annual International Conference on 15-16 September 2017 at Jaipuria, Noida,
India
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