Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about Open Access (OA) and the ridiculous profits that publishers make from our slave labour, not just in philosophy but more generally. This has had an actual impact — a positive one — on University and Research Council policies, at least in Europe. For instance, Research Councils UK (RCUK) recently announced their new Open Access Policy. Among other things, the policy states that:
Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:
1. must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access
In practice, this means that the journal must either be entirely OA, such as Philosophers' Imprint or The Australasian Journal of Logic, or support the option to purchase OA for individual articles for a fee. The latter option is being offered by most big publishers. However, the RCUK policy has an additional clause:
Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.
This clause applies even to those papers that are not already OA due to the paying of a separate fee. Philosophy falls within AHRC, and the maximum embargo for any papers emerging from AHRC funded research is 12 months. After that, the paper must be OA. This, I think, should become a standard.
RCUK is not alone with this. The European Commission has also announced a recommendation for a maximum embargo of 6 or 12 months.
Such initiatives are exactly what is needed to change the profession, as not all of us have the possibility to just say "no" when it comes to publishing, i.e. to only publish in full OA journals to begin with. However, there is a compromise available and it has been made especially easy for us philosophers. I'm thinking of the possibility of using PhilPapers as a self-archiving depository, similarly to how arxiv works for physics and the mathematical sciences. At the time of writing, only 3,589 out of the more than half a million papers in the PhilPapers index have been archived in PhilPapers, although many more are available from various self-archives. Not everyone has a web page though, or the desire to self-archive on their own web page, so this is a good, centralized opportunity.
The PhilPapers archive can certainly be used to self-archive after the 12 month embargo has passed — and it's one way to ensure that your paper is OA — but I see many papers archived even before that, despite publishers' embargoes. But has anyone ever heard of someone getting into trouble for copyright violation by posting their own work online? We certainly have the power here: the publishers will not be able to function without us.
Besides, PhilPapers has all sorts of nifty tools and features, such as the recently introduced download graphics and rankings:
The above is a screen capture of the Analytics section for my most downloaded paper, "The Law of Non-Contradiction as a Metaphysical Principle", which, incidentally, was published in the full OA journal AJL.
So, if you are in favour of OA, I urge you to self-archive in PhilPapers, there's no reason why it couldn't become the arxiv of philosophy. What's still problematic is that penultimate versions, which people generally archive, don't have correct page numbers and hence can't be properly cited. We can only hope that the pressure from both the funding bodies and academics will help to address this problem as well.
Leave a Reply to TuomasCancel reply