I think two issues, though very much related, are being mixed up here. On one hand there is the commercial corruption of big academic presses and academic journals publishers making obscene profits on basis of publicly financed information resources and then gouging the public, and every year more (*). The facts are well established and well known. And things are slowly - too slowly - changing.
Then there is what you could call moral corruption, and that is alas much more difficult to combat since it is happening from within academia itself. At the Commons Conference in Berlin, where I hold an agitated (my trademark ;-) elevator pitch for radical open access, I learned with some surprise from the (German) chair of our working group that he knew many academics who were quite attached to the 'closed shop' system of academic publishing. Because its financial wall 'protected' them against the great unwashed... It's a funny world. But not for Aaron. Do sign! Cheers, p+3D! (*) And then we are not even talking about rights recovery agencies, which for all practical purposes can be considered criminal rackets - in the case of the Spanish SGAE this is even actually so. JSTOR, being a non-profit, does admittedly not fall in that category. Yet it 'recovers costs' that should not be there in the first place. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
