About a year or so ago my wife began mentioning Jeffrey Beall’s Scholarly Open Access website to me with some frequency. As a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, Beall had become aware of bogus journals operating under the rubric of Open Access. As opposed to print journals behind a Jstor paywall, Open Access journals were strictly Internet-based and seemed to offer the possibility of being both a valuable resource to tenure-track professors looking for an opportunity to be published and non-academic readers interested in a scholarly treatment of a particular topic but not willing to pay the exorbitant fee for downloading an article.
While I generally don’t seek out Jstor type journals after some unpleasant experiences with capricious editors a decade ago, I made an exception for a special issue of “Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism” that was putting together a special issue on indigenous peoples. For the past five years or so I had been researching Comanche Indians and an invitation to submit something to CNS was just the impetus I needed to write the article that had been gestating for some time. If you go to the CNS website you will be given the opportunity to read the entire issue for $121. To save some money, you can read my piece titled “The Political Economy of Comanche Violence” for $36. I understand the need of print journals to cover the costs but there’s something troubling about these prices. full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/12/23/the-confidence-man/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
