the value of open access journals

A Facebook friend pointed out that the NY Times linked to a nearly forgotten piece on Heidegger and Leibniz that I published in Cultural Studies Review. It’s the second-to-last link HERE.

This is only possible because Cultural Studies Review (Sydney) is now an open access journal. It seems to me that the time for non-open access journals is passing or already past.

Why would you want to publish in a journal where your article will end up behind a Sage or Springer firewall rather than freely available to everyone? I can think of only one good reason: many of those firewalled for-subcriber journals are prestigious. And as a graduate student or junior faculty member, you are in the position of needing to impress job search committees or tenure and promotion committees by publishing in prestigious journals. If you put an article in one of the better Springer journals, that will enhance your fortunes in academia more than just posting it on someone’s para-academic website journal would do.

But it occurred to me a year or so ago that there’s no point being a tenured full professor if I don’t allow myself the freedom that goes with that. Namely, it no longer matters too much whether I’m in a prestigious journal or on someone’s website. In fact, the website will draw more readers, and faster.

Last night, Alexander Markov pulled out his iPad and was showing me a number of Russian student theses that refer to speculative realism, including my own work. To my astonishment, more than half of the footnotes to me were to posts on this blog rather than to my books.

And it makes perfect sense when you think about it. If you were a student in Moscow writing a thesis, and were a typical starving philosophy student who couldn’t afford to order a bunch of books from abroad, you would of course just follow all the blog posts as closely as you could.

In fact, I am now sorely tempted to self-publish everything other than books. I may just set up a website and post every one of my articles instead of going through the lengthy journal review process every time. We’ll all be doing that in 10 years anyway, so why not now? In the future, journals will still exist as seals of quality, clearing houses, and clutter-reducers. But I already have my readership, and may as well feed that readership more quickly than the journal system allows.