Uninformed, Unhinged, and Unfair — The Monbiot Rant (via The Scholarly Kitchen)

I had to force myself to use the “Like” option on WordPress on this one, because that’s the only way to reblog posts….

This supercilious item is an attempt to counter a polemical piece in the Grauniad recently by George Monbiot. That article was about the extortionate cost and general uselessness of the so-called Learned Journals, i.e. precisely the Academic Journal Racket I’ve blogged about previously. I agree with most of what Monbiot says.

You can tell from the tone of the opening paragraph that this rejoinder doesn’t present a coherent argument because it launches straight into invective. And notice too that this from an academic publisher, so it’s hardly unbiased….

Nevertheless I thought I’d reblog this in the interest of balance. Indeed, if the best arguments for retaining the monstrous expense of “scholarly” journals are those presented here then it’s just a question of time before real scholars see them for what they are and get rid of them.

Come the revolution, next in line after the bankers….*

*For the benefit of the entirely humourless amongst you, let me stress that I am not advocating armed revolution, summary execution or any other form of violence against the academic publishing industry. This line is what we in my country call “a joke”.

I tried to ignore it. It deserved to be ignored — an ill-informed activist with academic aspirations using the Guardian as a pulpit to deliver a tiresome sermon filled with intentional misunderstandings, misinformation, and misapprehensions about academic publishing. It deserved to be ignored. Predictably, it caught fire in the blogosphere, on Twitter, and on Facebook. And now I feel compelled to jump into the fray. After all, the only coherent … Read More

via The Scholarly Kitchen

Follow @telescoper