Let’s Start Talking About Open Access

I don’t write much about academia here, and perhaps I should start. As many know, all is not entirely well in American academia, especially in the humanities. Budget cuts, the increasing use of massive open online courses, the perils of publishing, the strangeness and delights of academic culture, the dearth of tenure track employment, the persistent political attack on college professors and how they do their job, and a general misunderstanding about academic labor demand more attention.

True, many people already address these issues far more cogently that I could . . . but news that Aaron Swartz committed suicide hit me. We academics rarely think about our work as a commodity, the mechanisms through which the public is denied access, and the profits corporations make by selling that access to mostly cash strapped public universities at exorbitant prices. But Swartz’s death is an indication that academic work is a high stakes game that can leave many of us with blood on our hands....

My personal concern besides the fact that a young man has committed suicide (which Swartz’s family says was directly connected the US Attorney’s office aggressive pursuit of this case), is that two professional organizations I belong to, the American Historical Association and the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, both house their journals with JSTOR, not to mention all of the major journals covering the Eurasian region are part of either JSTOR, Project Muse (both non-profit), Wiley Online, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, (all for profit) and others...