{"id":1035,"date":"2015-03-30T18:59:41","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T22:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/?p=1035"},"modified":"2015-03-31T09:41:01","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T13:41:01","slug":"should-you-boycott-traditional-journals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/1035","title":{"rendered":"Should You Boycott Traditional Journals?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Or, Should I Stay or Should I Go?<\/strong><\/em>)<\/p>\n

Is it time to boycott “traditional” scholarly publishing? Perhaps you are an academic researcher, just like me. Perhaps, just like me, you think that there are a lot of exciting developments in scholarly publishing<\/strong> thanks to the Internet. And you want to support them. And you also want people to read your research. But you also still need to be sure that your publication venues are held in high regard.<\/p>\n

Or maybe you just receive research funding that is subject to new open access requirements<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Ask<\/a><\/p>\n

Academia is a funny place. We are supposedly\u00a0self-governing<\/strong>. So if we don’t like how our scholarly communications are organized we should be able to fix this ourselves. If we are dissatisfied with the journal system, we’re going to have to do something about it. The question of whether or not it is now time to eschew closed access journals<\/strong> is something that comes up a fair amount among my peers.<\/p>\n

It comes up often enough that a group of us at Michigan\u00a0decided to write an article on the topic<\/strong>.\u00a0Here’s the article. \u00a0It just came out yesterday\u00a0(open access, of course):<\/p>\n

Carl Lagoze, Paul Edwards, Christian Sandvig, & Jean-Christophe Plantin.\u00a0(2015). Should I stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing<\/strong><\/a>. International Journal of Communication 9<\/em>: 1072-1081.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0article is intended for those who want some help figuring out the answer to the question the article title poses: Should I stay or should I go? It’s meant help you decipher the\u00a0unstable landscape of\u00a0scholarly publishing<\/strong> these days. (Note that we restrict our topic\u00a0to journal publishing.)<\/p>\n

Researching it was a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit\u00a0about how scholarly communication works.<\/p>\n