Abstract

Debates about the possibilities and importance of open access publishing in academia are reaching a crucial stage. British universities are implementing “author archiving”, electronically storing their staff’s outputs for online public access. At the same time, an increasing number of academics are calling for an overhaul of journal publishing processes—urging us to sign a petition to the European Commission in support of open access (EC Petition 2007). Journal publishers are fighting a rearguard action in response. This ranges from making some of their content freely available, to creating complicated licence forms allowing authors to only post articles online several months (in some cases years) after publication; the chief concern of publishers is the potentially dramatic loss of revenue (Shepherd 2007). The result for academics is a messy and confusing situation where even fine attention to the small print of such licences offers little clarity. Whether we are correctly abiding by these licences or not, there needs to be a more assertive discussion within academic geography about our outputs. Many geographers have critically engaged with our publishing practices, encouraging academics to write in more accessible styles and in nonacademic locations (Castree 2006; Mitchell 2006; Smith 2000). Condemnation of the negative consequences of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) on how we publish abounds; as does criticism of the Anglo-American hegemony in our conferences and publishing (Minca 2003). Moreover, the recent campaign to boycott Elsevier publications (including Political Geography, Geoforum, and Applied Geography) due to their support for arms trading has highlighted how “academic practices are increasingly enmeshed with capitalist social relations through their links with, and dependency on, multinational publishing companies” (Chatterton and Featherstone 2006:5). This move to be more critically aware of the commercialisation not just of our institutions, but also of our outputs, is necessary and

Highlights

  • The hypocrisy of not making all our academic writings freely available is most acute for so-called radical and critical geographers

  • Do many of us advocate reaching beyond academic boundaries in our actions, teaching and writings, 1 assertively criticising any division between the „real world‟ and academia, but many of us engage with those who advocate the necessity of a „creative commons‟, challenge notions of copyright, or build open publishing alternatives, such as Indymedia (Pickerill, 2007)

  • The final copy may only be posted online 24 months after publication and the authors are not permitted to post the PDF version. Other geography journals, such as Progress in Human Geography, allow on-line posting after 12 months, but again not using the PDF version

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Summary

Introduction

The hypocrisy of not making all our academic writings freely available is most acute for so-called radical and critical geographers. ACME, established in 2002, was founded in recognition of the need to democratise knowledge production and to “challenge the political economy of academic journal publishing. Associated with ACME is the Praxis (e)Press, an open access e-book publishing house, through which geographers have published an edited collection freely available for download online (Fuller and Kitchin, 2004).

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