Via The Register: Dutch academics declare research free-for-all
Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.
Very interesting and perhaps a sign of things to come vis-a-vis journals in particular.
You see, while academic can make money writing books (I stress can), they don’t make any money off of journal pubs (usually–certainly that is the case in the social sciences, and if I understand some of my colleagues in the hard sciences properly, they actually have to pay to get their work published in some circumstances). As such, the only incentives for an academic to submit work to a journal is twofold: 1) exposure and 2) peer review (i.e., the stamp of approval of others in your field).
Now, the internet provides a massive opportunity for exposure, so the main issue for such distribution of materials would be the peer review question.
One does begin to wonder how journals will evolve going forward, given that students and professors alike are more and more inclined to use electronic versions of articles and such. Indeed, I am not certain that a lot of my students fully comprehend what a journal is. Like with the movement of thinking about songs not albums, we tend to think about individual articles, and less the actual journals.
You missed the other incentive: Tenure decisions are made based in part (a large part) on publications.
Comment by bryan — Thursday, May 12, 2024 @ 10:39 am