Open Access a threat to academic freedom?

It is no secret to people following my academic writings or this blog for that matter: I am no great fan of Open Access. Its low barriers to market entry have led to a proliferation of dodgy OA outfits that by now easily outnumber the decent OA publishers, and there is no end in sight.  Beall's List of Predatory Publishers flags the magnitude of the problem at hand. Budding academics and those not quite competitive enough to actually get published in decent journals fall prey to their money making schemes in breathtaking numbers. There's more to be said about the business as well as academic flaws of current OA business models, but that isn't the topic of this blog entry.

Recently humanities scholars have woken up to the threat that OA causes to their academic freedom to publish, or so they claim. At the heart of their complaint is this: A whole bunch of research funders insist that the research they fund must be published in an OA journal. Several problems with this: It is probably fair to say that there are only a handful - if that many - decent OA humanities journals out there, and they likely are not in medieval history. If scholars in those disciplines whose work is publicly funded were forced to publish in whatever OA 'journal' (aka webserver) exists in their discipline they would effectively be forced to publish in a location where - really - they would not want to be seen dead. Subscription based journals - often needed to fund academic society activities, something conveniently forgotten in the rush to the economic bottom pit that is OA - would see their submission base diminished as funded academics would no longer be able to choose them as their preferred outlets.

Truth be told, most humanities published research these days isn't funded research to begin with. This is the reason why OA hasn't taken off in our neck of the woods. However, many of us are working in public universities, our salaries are fully or partially funded by taxpayer $$. Forcing us to submit to OA outlets the moment we get our hands on the meagre research funds that are out there for us, would have detrimental consequences for our ability to communicate our findings to colleagues, because they would have to look for our work in the dodgiest of places. It would likely have a deleterious effect on the places (specialist journals with often low circulation) where we discuss and advance our research. It would also likely destroy the viability of some academic societies. Subscription based journal publisher now frequently offer OA options, proposing fairly high fees (>3000$ isn't unusual) to those with spare cash. I must say that I like this idea a lot, because it keeps established loci of academic conversations alive and kicking. I am not so sure what this means in the long-term for the viability of their subscription business model though. Say, if you would make 50% of content in a given volume OA, why should any librarian continue paying the full subscription fee for a journal that's available half-way to anyone who isn't a subscriber. There are undoubtedly challenges ahead, suffice it to say though that I like these latter developments both as an author as an editor.

Some universities have begun to offer funding to humanities researchers who have no external research funding but want to submit to OA publications. Obviously this is only sustainable if dramatic cut-backs at the subscription journals front happen, or if you work for a bank (Harvard, Princeton, Oxbride, etc). Humanities scholars are well-advised to monitor carefully what's happening in their research publishing domains as governments and research funders have decided to revolutionise the way we communicate our research fundings to each other, whether we like it or not. I do think there's a potential threat to our academic freedom to publish in a location of our choosing, but it doesn't seem to be as dramatic as some academics make it to be. After all, there ARE other ways to communicate your work to the world and your colleagues, for instance via social networking, blogging, repositories such as SSRN, academia.edu, university based OA repositories and so on and so forth. Of course, should you need an actual academic job, you'll find that these sorts of outlets are not going to get you one... Incidentally, at least for the humanities this is true also for pretty much any OA (online only) publication you chose to go for.

Post scriptum: As an aside, it seems university libraries have been at the forefront of pushing for OA. Makes one wonder, in time of diminishing library funds, whether that's a classic example of having your cake and eating it. Be that as it may, it turns out, the same libraries have also been busy robbing students of their copyright to their own research theses stored on library servers. Remakable times!

Those reference letters

The older you get, the more reference letters you are asked to write. The price you pay for moving closer to death. - This thing cuts really both ways. Initially you spent your while hassling busy mentors of yours to do reference letters for you, and another, and another ... you felt bad, and no doubt, so did they. Well, eventually you find yourself in the same situation, provided you do/did some mentoring or other.

Here are several problems I have both with writing and reading reference letters:

1) More often than not what I read is utterly dishonest and stands in no relation to the person who is being praised over the moon. As a result of seeing this time and again, I barely - if at all - bother reading reference letters. I assume that whoever requested one asked someone with the understanding that it would be a positive, uncritical letter. Well, if all I find out is what is good about a particular job applicant, and I have good reason to assume that whatever is written down in the reference letter is hyperbolic, what's the point?

2) My problem as a reference letter writer is that I can't get myself to lie even in order to help good people. So, if you were to ever compare my reference letters to those of people who do the whole hyperbolic shebang, you'd think I hated a candidate who I actually think would be a good choice. Am I supposed to put on the rhetorical battle gear and write about that 'one in a life-time' future academic, a coming academic superstar? I don't even think of current crowned academic superstars (just check the philosophical gossip site Leiter Report for ongoing coronation activities) in those terms.  I know that, secretly they go to the loo, just like I do, and just like Professor Middle-of-the-Road at Popplesdorf University.

3) I would love a system whereby reference letters could be honest and balanced. In the absence of this, I prefer to stick only to objective markers like peer reviewed publications, citations of those publications, teaching evaluations, etc, when it comes to academic appointments. You might want to take a closer look and check how frequently, especially in the arts and humanities, appointments are made based on verifiable evidence of excellence versus appointments made entirely on a candidate's capacity to drop names and attract reference letters from crowned superstar academics. It's painful to watch.

4) Dishonest reference letters reflect very badly on the professional who wrote them! I mean, once I have seen Prof XYZ praise a weak student to me, and I fell for the praise, what would I think of future reference letters I received from that same professor? These sorts of activities can only work efficiently for a short period of time, begging the question why Prof XYZ thought it would be sensible to lie about her supposedly to brilliant student!

5) So, what lesson is there to be drawn from this? Are we really compelled to lie reasonably qualified to good candidates into jobs with our reference letters, because that's what everyone else is doing?

All a bit self-defeating, isn't it? As I said, I give close to no weight and attention to reference letters. I wonder how many others in more senior positions do the same. Are we all wasting our time with this sort of stuff?

ps: you're welcome to make use of the disposable bullshit bag displayed to the top left of this blog. Seems the perfect place for most reference letters.

Why study? and Why study arts and humanities subjects?

Students in most countries today pay tuition fees. Even countries that took great pride in their public universities (like Australia, Germany and the UK)started quietly with smallish top-up fees, higher education contribution schemes or whatever their euphemism for charging higher education students for their education might have been. Fees went up and up and up ever since. It goes without saying that people from poorer families face ever higher hurdles in their attempts at accessing higher education. They'll either often be unable to afford steep up-front fees, or the thought of gigantic student debts will put them off higher education forever. There are all sorts of rationales, some less rational than others, for why these fees were and are supposedly necessary.

It's probably worth noting that in each of the countries mentioned they were introduced by a generation of politicians that themselves benefited from tuition free access to university. Probably a phenomenon similar to that miserable little black man on the US Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. A beneficiary of affirmative action policies if there ever was one, he now spends most of his time on turning back the clock on affirmative action (as well as civil rights like reproductive rights of women). I digress, I apologize.

Now, given that students pay ever more and more, and end up with ever higher debts when they graduate - let's ignore those scholarship receiving students attending investment banks with a little bit of education attached to them, like Harvard University, Princeton and other elitist outfits - it seems worth asking, why students continue to study for degrees in the arts and humanities, given that such degrees are not exactly leading to straightforward money-printing-press-equivalent degrees as law and medicine degrees , or even engineering degrees do.

Well, and here is the surprising finding from Great Britain: It is so, because only 35% of students polled in the UK declared that their primary reason for studying what they studied was the job prospects. 38% declared that they studied what they studied because of their love for the subject of their course. (This, of course includes people for whom their choice of study subject is both a subject that they love, and a subject that they chose because of job prospects.) That I find surprisingly reassuring.

Despite various governments' efforts to eliminate anything to do with culture from universities (by starving the arts and humanities of funding for research and teaching), our new 'customers' voted with their feet and elected to study arts and humanities subjects anyway. Many young people seem to have decided that universities are not merely educational factories designed to offer glorified vocational training and pseudo-academic degrees like Master's degrees in jeans design and similar such nonsense.

It is fair to say that academics have failed in most countries pretty miserably in defending the academy against the onslaughts of those aiming to transform universities into vocational training outfits. Students' love for the subjects they choose are probably one of the reasons for why arts and humanities continue to thrive these days, despite all the dooms-day sayers.