Joel Wainwright and I recently wrote and published a Geoforum editorial about the urgent need to divest from Elsevier en the corporate publishing model:
The commercial scientific publishing model is broken. The basic problem is simple. We scholars give the products of our labour our research papers, reviews, and so forth — for free to for-profit corporations. These corporations then sell the same products of our labour back to us, via libraries. This arrangement might be acceptable if the publishing industry charged only modest fees or contributed some fundamental quality to the work. But they do neither. No matter how much they say they care about knowledge, their main priority is — as with any for-profit corporation — maximizing returns for private investors. In pursuing this goal, they employ creative means to extract resources from the public purse to pay for exorbitant journal fees – funds that otherwise could be invested in public research and education. In the process, the publishing corporations intensify a perverse focus on impact factors, citation counts, ‘clickbait’ articles and academic branding, rather than genuine engagement. All this degrades the quality of academic work and serves to undermine the conditions in which many of us work.
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Simply put, the publishing industry works against the interests of the scholarly community. And yet, as with other perverse political economies, we academics are deeply implicated in this unjust situation. Although many curse the status quo, we actively reproduce it through our collaboration— above all, by continuing to contribute the products of our labour freely. Despite widespread frustration, it has proven difficult even to get critical scholars to agree on a course of action that would challenge the model. Particularly frustrating is that untenured scholars are basically trapped in the system, forced to reproduce their own exploitation in order to survive in academia.
Bram Büscher 
Reblogged this on Political Ecology Network.
It is good that you wrote about the need to distance our academic selves from the corporate publishing houses. But that makes me wonder: why did you publish this short article through Geoforum, a journal that is owned by one of these houses?
Unless established scholars like you do not practice what you preach, the corporate houses will not loosen their grip over our souls. Younger scholars and early career researchers will not gather courage simnply because you said so. They will, if you do so youyrself to set a model before them.
In case you didn’t know, there are many open access journals around us; I am part of the Editorial Collective of ACME (an international e-journal on critical geography). My university (Australian National University) publishes e-books that can be downloaded at no cost.
Check out my book, ‘Gendering the Field’ on ANU Press site, and watch out for the next one, ‘Between the Plough & the Pick’ to be published in March, 2018!
Thanks for the response. This came out of Geoforum editorial board discussions, that is why we published it in Geoforum. But your point is a good one. Thanks also for book tip – will check it out.
[…] Simply put, the publishing industry works against the interests of the scholarly community. And yet, as with other perverse political economies, we academics are deeply implicated in this unjust situation. Although many curse the status quo, we actively reproduce it through our collaboration— above all, by continuing to contribute the products of our labour freely. Despite widespread frustration, it has proven difficult even to get critical scholars to agree on a course of action that would challenge the model. Particularly frustrating is that untenured scholars are basically trapped in the system, forced to reproduce their own exploitation in order to survive in academia. Read the entire article here. Originally published on POLLEN – Political Ecology Network and Bram Büscher – On the Natures of Political Ecology, Development and Change […]
“Why continue to create a journal that is inaccessible to our colleagues in Germany and undermines our academic colleagues everywhere?”
This is the question that the editorial boards of all academic journals should now be considering. But given their past behaviour, nothing much is likely to happen. After all, there have been good reasons to boycott Elsevier et al for a long time.
Anyway, the problem of accessing journals has already been solved by Sci-Hub.