Sunday, November 6, 2011

Boycott Routledge and Ashgate

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences might consider boycotting profit-driven academic publishers such as Routledge and Ashgate, who aren't affiliated with university presses and publish huge quantities of academic scholarship of highly variable quality—the admittedly imperfect peer-review process seems to be administered even less judiciously than usual—at usorious prices.  Let's continue  to institutionalize a reliable peer-review process for free, open-access online journals so that tenure and promotion committees will respect them and college professors and instructors will be able to keep their jobs without resorting to publishing with presses that charge extortionate prices that neither individuals nor many libraries can afford.  Not that university presses are much better, what with all the $150-plus volumes they're putting out.  Now that I think about it, perhaps we could agree not to buy or cite anything priced at over $100.  A less extreme but more subversive approach would be to include the list price of each volume whenever we cite it in a footnote or bibliography.

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