A call to action from BYU English professor Gideon Burton: Stop intellectual apartheid!
Let me illustrate how academic institutions enforce Intellectual Apartheid through a simple experiment you can perform right now. Let’s say that you are researching lingering effects of South Africa’s apartheid and you discovered (as I did using Google Scholar) a recent article, “Fantasmatic Transactions: On the Persistence of Apartheid Ideology” (published in Subjectivity in July, 2008 by D. Hook). Now for the experiment: click on this link to the full text of the article.
One of two things just occurred. Either you just gained immediate access to a PDF version of the full article; or, more likely, an authentication window popped up requesting your login credentials. It turns out that Palgrave-Macmillan publishes Subjectivity, and through their website one can get access to this article for a mere $30. Alternatively, one may subscribe to the journal for $503 per year.
You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?
Gideon also gives suggestions for scholars, librarians, and administrators.
“Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.”
This is an odd statement to me, since it suggests that the preferable alternative is to ignore economic interests and let the trustworthy (and expensive to operate) systems fail, in favor of letting the untrustworthy sources have the run of the information landscape. This hardly seems like the path toward growth of knowledge and the betterment of society.
Information, no matter how much it may want to be free, is not without cost. The cost of producing quality content is very high, and making it available for free is not a recipe for balancing your budget even if you have a large circulation (just ask the New York Times), much less if there is only a very small, specialized market for your work. This is important: the reason for the pay model is that the people who are the users of the service are the ones who need to shoulder the burden of keeping it viable, because no one else will.
His complaint that specialized knowledge is being kept from all but other specialists is ignoring the fact that most of the world also has no interest in specialized knowledge. It is very unlikely, for example, that “Molecular Spintronics and Quantum Computing” (19 Journal of Materials Chemistry 1661-1768) would be of any interest to all but a few thousand specialists in the field of materials science. To say that putting it behind a subscription wall is denying access to billions of people may be technically correct, but it’s also misleading. It’s a little like saying someone who hates chocolate is being denied the free samples at the Hershey factory just because she would have to pay to take the tour.
He’s right, of course, that this means that a large portion of the world cannot afford to subscribe to the service. In my view, this is one of the reasons why the role of libraries in society is increasing, not decreasing, in importance. Libraries have, since their start (at least since the start of the modern public library, ca. 1850?), been the equalizer in this problem. His recommendation that libraries spend less money securing access to toll-access scholarship, therefore, seems wrong: anyone who walks into the university library here can have free access (courtesy of the State of Illinois) to any of gazillions of electronic resources here. That is increasing the access, not decreasing it.
It’s not a popular opinion, but I still think that peer-reviewed journals are critically important for the intellectual health of our society. The publishing industry certainly has its problems (I’m looking at *you*, Elsevier!), and the system has its problems. And don’t even get me started on the problems with our copyright laws (copyright term, DMCA, orphan works,…) But the central argument here seems weak to me. It certainly doesn’t smack of Apartheid.