{"id":490,"date":"2012-09-06T16:47:02","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T14:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=490"},"modified":"2012-09-06T16:47:02","modified_gmt":"2012-09-06T14:47:02","slug":"freeing-research-from-the-market-the-british-case-and-china-mieville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/09\/06\/freeing-research-from-the-market-the-british-case-and-china-mieville\/","title":{"rendered":"FREEING RESEARCH FROM THE MARKET: THE BRITISH CASE (AND CHINA MI\u00c9VILLE) <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

A colleague emailed me back in July yet another article on this new phenomenon I\u2019ve 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<\/em> (http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/21559317<\/a>) to announce that \u201cAcademic journals face a radical shake-up.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The novelty that The Economist<\/em>\u2019s article highlights is the British Government\u2019s announcement on July 16th \u201cthat, from 2013, the results of taxpayer-financed research would be available, free and online, for anyone to read and redistribute.\u201d I haven\u2019t seen this piece of news commented on at all in Spain although apparently \u201cOn July 17th the European Union followed suit.\u201d I have already commented on Harvard University\u2019s reluctance to paying overpriced bulk rates for journal subscriptions and it seems, again according to The Economist<\/em>, that some private foundations are also demanding that the research they finance be made freely available. <\/p>\n

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 \u2018gold model\u2019 \u2013by which authors pay a fee to have their research made available for free on specialised websites\u2013 and the \u2018green model\u2019 by which research is posted to a free \u201crepository\u201d by the journals themselves one year after publication. The craziest, most appealing idea is that of \u2018arXiv\u2019, where scientists send their manuscripts for a \u201cruthless process of open peer review.\u201d Um, you need a thick skin for that!<\/p>\n

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, \u201cwhen the French Journal des s\u00e7avans<\/em> and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society<\/em> first began systematically publishing research results\u201d (\u201cScientific journal\u201d, Wikipedia). Still are indeed. <\/p>\n

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<\/em> funded through our salaries to write and publish. We are in the market for jobs but precisely the whole point of our tenured<\/em> jobs is to give us time (less and less) for thinking, writing and publishing without<\/em> market pressures.<\/p>\n

Where am I going with all this? Well, the enfant terrible of British SF\/fantasy, China Mi\u00e9ville \u2013this is a guy\u2013, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, recently caused quite a stir when he wondered at the Edinburgh World Writers\u2019 Conference \u201cWhat if novelists and poets were to get a salary, the wage of a skilled worker?\u201d (http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2012\/aug\/21\/china-mieville-the-future-of-the-novel<\/a>) For whereas the internet may free research, it may also destroy for good the market for literary writers. Mi\u00e9ville, of course, realises that the process of selection would be very complicated. \u201cGod knows we shouldn’t trust the state to make that kind of decision\u201d, he said, though he realises the state would be involved, somehow. <\/p>\n

He is asking, in short, for tenured positions \u2013what I enjoy thanks to the Spanish state<\/em> as a civil servant, precisely in order to write research on the English Literature that authors like Mi\u00e9ville produce (my UK colleagues no longer enjoy that privilege thanks to Maggie Thatcher, by the way). <\/p>\n

This is what I call ironic… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A colleague emailed me back in July yet another article on this new phenomenon I\u2019ve 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 \u201cAcademic journals face a radical shake-up.\u201d The main arguments are the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[408],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}