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You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access journal

You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access journals or otherwise. There is some movement here. Increasingly hiring committees are taking other reputation metrics into account when evaluating work (inbound citation counts, readership metrics, follower counts - anything that may make the job of an evaluation committee a little bit easier). The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. Institutions pay $8 billion a year to subscribe to journals, and they would be only too glad to cancel those subscriptions if they could.

pseut 14y ago
>The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. I'd love to see data on this, so I can see why my experience is atypical: are conventions different in some fields than others? Do I just have good luck? Am I misremembering or just wrong (which is possible)? The original article states, "Much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" and I'd really like to know exactly which articles Manjoo has looked for and been unable to find w/out a university license. Institutional access needs to be a lot more comprehensive than what almost any individual needs access to, so I don't think that their subscription costs really are compelling evidence against my experience. I'm kind of surprised that no one's pointed out an easy and really effective step MIT could take unilaterally: make all of the journals the MIT Press publishes open access (MIT is also a publisher). Some of them are among the best journals in their fields (e.g. the Quarterly Journal of Economics is one of the 4 most prestigious journals in econ and the Review of Economics and Statistics is very very good).

pseut 14y ago

>The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. I'd love to see data on this, so I can see why my experience is atypical: are conventions different in some fields than others? Do I just have good luck? Am I misremembering or just wrong (which is possible)? The original article states, "Much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" and I'd really like to know exactly which articles Manjoo has looked for and been unable to find w/out a university license. Institutional access needs to be a lot more comprehensive than what almost any individual needs access to, so I don't think that their subscription costs really are compelling evidence against my experience. I'm kind of surprised that no one's pointed out an easy and really effective step MIT could take unilaterally: make all of the journals the MIT Press publishes open access (MIT is also a publisher). Some of them are among the best journals in their fields (e.g. the Quarterly Journal of Economics is one of the 4 most prestigious journals in econ and the Review of Economics and Statistics is very very good).