Open Access Publishing – Thanks to the U of Utah and Social Text
I will have a new article out next year in Social Text. I am very happy about this, because ST was a very important journal to me as I went through my doctoral program in cultural studies at George Mason. And of course, I eagerly watch my RSS reader for more articles. Moreover, I got to e-collaborate a bit with the editor, Jonathan Beller, who was really good at pushing me to improve the article through the revision process.
The article is titled “Real (software) abstractions: on the rise of Facebook and the fall of MySpace.” (You can see an early version of the article here). Here’s the abstract:
This paper argues that the failure of MySpace and the rise of Facebook in the social networking site market is due in part to the degrees in which either site associates users, technology, and marketers into a successful “real software abstraction.” Real software abstraction is a synthesis of the software engineering concept of abstraction and the Marxian concept of the real abstraction. This concept is used to examine MySpace and Facebook at the levels of aesthetics, code, culture, and appeal to marketers. I argue that instead of creating an architecture of abstraction in which users’ affect and content were easily reduced to marketer-friendly data sets, MySpace allowed users to create a cacophony of “pimped” profiles that undermined efforts to monetize user-generated content. In contrast, Facebook has proven to be extremely efficient at reducing users to commodifiable data sets within a muted, bland interface that does not detract from marketing efforts.
But most exciting to me is the fact that both Social Text and the librarians at The University of Utah have allowed me to publish this article open-access. No one will need a subscription to see it. Ever.
This was made possible first by the folks at Duke U Press, who agreed to publish the article open-access for a small fee. They had not done this before with Social Text (and possibly with no other journal). I am very grateful they did this.
Second, the Marriott Library at the U of U has an Open Access Publishing fund program, headed by the incomparable Allyson Mower. They awarded me a grant to pay the OA fee at Duke.
Of course, the pace of academic publishing is slow – the article will be out next year some time. But, when it’s out, it will be free as in free beer. And I love that.
I hope this is something that Social Text offers on a permanent basis. I think it’s in keeping with that journal’s cultural studies mission. Cultural studies at its best is a world of activism and progressive social change. And making knowledge open access is a key part of improving humanity – science, scholarship, and education are better with greater access to information.
Do you think other academics looking to be published in less tech savvy fields will adopt open access publishing? If so what do you think it will take for that to happen?
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “less tech savvy fields” – but I will take that to mean the humanities, since the sciences already tend to publish a higher percentage of their articles in open access publishing. It’s really hard to say. There’s a lot of structural problems. The humanities as a whole is not doing well in terms of maintaining full-time faculty, and thus the need for full-time people to publish in high-ranking journals is increasing – otherwise, we don’t get to keep our jobs. And open access journals don’t tend to have the prestige of subscription ones. BUT – that said, if more journals like Social Text do allow for open access publishing, and if more schools support scholars who want to go that route by providing funding to cover the fees, then the situation might change. Regardless, one of the fundamental scams in higher ed is the fact that people pay taxes and tuition in part for me to do research, and then I publish that research for free in a journal, and the journal turns around and charges the (tax and tuition-funded) university libraries a big subscription fee.