Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road

Abstract

All four authors are members of the Leicester school of critical management and have previously written together on academic publishing. David Harvie lectures in finance and is interested in ethical issues related to this and other matters. He is a member of The Free Association writing collective. Geoff Lightfoot lectures in entrepreneurship and has particular interests in the ideology of markets and critical accounting. Simon Lilley works on information aspects of organisation and is currently head of the School of Management at Leicester University. Kenneth Weir is interested in accounting practices, especially critical and social accounting.

From the open road to the high seas? Piracy, damnation and resistance in academic consumption of publishing

“…But it may be that we could be more sympathetic to the 'trading' of academic knowledge …' doing nothing' to prevent the trading of electronic copies of our academic work could act to circumvent the perils of engagement with the academic publishing industry. (Harvie et al, 2014) But what does this really mean? In practice, most academics are happy to send people a copy of their papers if asked.…”

Honoring the Lion: A Festschrift for Jan de Leeuw

“…He appreciated very early on that the Internet allows scholars who do so much of the work of typesetting, editing, and reviewing technical papers to put the works online themselves, cutting out the middleman, commercial publishers. The profits of scholarly publishing houses have long been obscene (McGuigan and Russell 2008); in 2011, operating profit margins of the largest academic publishers approached 40% (Harvie, Lightfoot, Lilley, and Weir 2013). University libraries must strain to purchase subscriptions to scholarly journals, and the public is largely locked out of the research results it funds.…”

Becoming Editor: Or, Pinocchio finally notices the Strings

“…This has been one of the reasons that there has been a recent and vigorous debate about the dissemination of the results of publically funded science, and which has resulted in a number of policy proposals in the global north which attempt to intervene in the process by which knowledge capitalists (though not ranking entrepreneurs) extract value from the process 10 . From academics and citizens there have there been petitions against particular publishers (such as Elsevier 11 ), sustained criticism of the practices of others (such as Emerald/MCB, see Davis 2005), journal editors refusing rankings and assessment 12 , editorial boards leaving publishers to set up their own journals and much discussion of open access and e-journals (Beverungen et al 2012, Harvie et al 2012, Harvie et al 2013, Fuchs and Sandoval 2013. Whatever the merits of these proposals and activities, the diagnosis is clear.…”