On Open Access (from the Guardian Weekly), and volunteerism

[Peter Matthews]

John East, in a letter to the Guardian Weekly ("How access stacks up", 02.10.09) defends the role of librarians in making information as widely available to people as possible.

'...it is researchers, not librarians, who decide to publish their output with "predatory publishers". Librarians have been at the forefront of the Open Access movement. Unfortunately the competition for tenure and promotion means that most researchers still to prefer to publish with prestigious publishers and in highly-cited, expensive journals.'

But East is also sympathetic with publishers:

'To be fair, not all publishers are predatory. The process of selecting, reviewing, editing and disseminating high-quality academic publications, and then providing online access, is very expensive.'

Even the commercial academic publishers depend on volunteer contributions of large numbers of more-or-less willing researchers. Without a continued spirit of volunteerism, I believe that the quality of academic publishing will decline, as the quantity increases. Of course, there will always be pockets of good-quality writing and publishing, across disciplines and geographical regions and languages, but how can we find the good publications, learn from them, and work with them? How can we help to raise the quality of writing published elsewhere: where are the little-known publications with good potential?

Part of the problem is that potential volunteers face an ever increasing array of possible publishers to support.

In the past, there were fewer publications to consider, and we spent most of our time with slower more local forms of communication, so the choices were easier to make. Today, almost anyone anywhere can communicate with the editors of any publication anywhere else.

We have to learn how to be selective in our volunteer efforts.

Any suggestions?