On Electronic Academic Publishing

Timothy Burke has a righteous rant on why we need to move scholarly publishing to an electronic form. It's all spot-on, but the following paragraphs are really producing the stand up and cheer! feeling I'm having right now:

If the compensation of publishing in journals or doing peer review is reputation capital, then academics are incredibly ill-served by relying on publishers who restrict the availability and circulation of journal publications. If you publish a journal article, you want it assigned in classes, you want it available for viewing by anyone and everyone at every hour of every day on any computer, you want it to be searchable. You don't want somebody to have to pay directly or indirectly through a library to get your article. The only restraint on circulation you want is that anyone using your work should have to acknowledge it, but there is no difference on this issue between electronic and print publication.



It’s also a socially unjust form of academic publication. My many colleagues who express copious concern about justice for the developing world or questions of global equity in academia ought to line up aggressively behind the digital publication and distribution of journals.



Everything about academic journals is easily migrated into digital form. There is no reason in the world not to do it, and do it right now.

Word.