A colleague emailed me back in July yet another article on this new phenomenon I’ve been discussing here in fits and starts: the demand that research be freed from the market. This time it was the turn of The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21559317) to announce that “Academic journals face a radical shake-up.” The main arguments are the ones I do defend: research funded with public resources should be available for free; journal publication is slow and expensive and it hampers research rather than promote it; publishers make excessive profits by exploiting university budgets that should be used to fund more research.
The novelty that The Economist’s article highlights is the British Government’s announcement on July 16th “that, from 2013, the results of taxpayer-financed research would be available, free and online, for anyone to read and redistribute.” I haven’t seen this piece of news commented on at all in Spain although apparently “On July 17th the European Union followed suit.” I have already commented on Harvard University’s reluctance to paying overpriced bulk rates for journal subscriptions and it seems, again according to The Economist, that some private foundations are also demanding that the research they finance be made freely available.
The article also comments as solutions to the problem of how to replace the services provided by publishers (peer reviewing and so on) on the ‘gold model’ –by which authors pay a fee to have their research made available for free on specialised websites– and the ‘green model’ by which research is posted to a free “repository” by the journals themselves one year after publication. The craziest, most appealing idea is that of ‘arXiv’, where scientists send their manuscripts for a “ruthless process of open peer review.” Um, you need a thick skin for that!
All this requires a huge effort of reorganisation, both structural in terms of how exactly repositories can replace journals and also in mental terms. Journals, after all, have been a key piece of research since 1665, “when the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first began systematically publishing research results” (“Scientific journal”, Wikipedia). Still are indeed.
Let me stress that the whole point of this new ongoing revolution has to do not just with the fact that most research is publicly funded via research projects but also that we, university researchers, are per se funded through our salaries to write and publish. We are in the market for jobs but precisely the whole point of our tenured jobs is to give us time (less and less) for thinking, writing and publishing without market pressures.
Where am I going with all this? Well, the enfant terrible of British SF/fantasy, China Miéville –this is a guy–, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, recently caused quite a stir when he wondered at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference “What if novelists and poets were to get a salary, the wage of a skilled worker?” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-the-future-of-the-novel) For whereas the internet may free research, it may also destroy for good the market for literary writers. Miéville, of course, realises that the process of selection would be very complicated. “God knows we shouldn’t trust the state to make that kind of decision”, he said, though he realises the state would be involved, somehow.
He is asking, in short, for tenured positions –what I enjoy thanks to the Spanish state as a civil servant, precisely in order to write research on the English Literature that authors like Miéville produce (my UK colleagues no longer enjoy that privilege thanks to Maggie Thatcher, by the way).
This is what I call ironic…