[Buddha-l] Useful for Enlightenment?

[Christopher Fynn]

Alberto

The institution where you are (UVa) already hosts the Tibetan and 
Himalayan Library <http://www.thlib.org> through which a number of 
interesting journals are freely available  - including the Journal of 
the International Association of Tibetan Studies (JIATS) ISSN 1550-6363 
<http://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/> or 
<http://www.thdl.org/collections/journal/jiats/index.php>

- Chris

Alberto Todeschini wrote:
> Piya Tan worte:
> 
> "Thanks Katherine, it's great that JGB allows free downloads of its
> article. I've always enjoyed reading Makransky's works. He has a long
> papers in the issue you mentioned."
> 
> Hi Piya,
> 
> Your comment points to an issue that I feel strongly about:
> 
> - an average size-university (I'm thinking of the University of Virginia 
> where I currently am) spends around  $4000000 in a single year for 
> e-subscriptions;
> 
> - for-profit publishers (especially 4 large companies, whose behavior 
> has been described as monopolistic by a copyright lawyer whose talk I 
> recently saw)) made $ 15 billion (!) in 2008 alone in subscriptions. 
> This is all money flowing out of higher education;
> 
> - poorer universities/institutions/individuals can't afford to subscribe 
> to journals or even buy individual articles, which sometimes are priced 
> at $40-50 for a single PDF;
> 
> - we in the West write about Buddhism and people in many Buddhist 
> countries can't afford to read what we write;
> 
> - in spite of the enormous financial revenue, publishers have produced a 
> very small amount of innovation and inventiveness. In fact, some of them 
> provide services that are mediocre at best.
> 
> Hence, I encourage people to look at open access:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)
> 
> It always pains me when new journals are launched and editors decide to 
> go for the old model of doing things, which further shackles academia to 
> greedy businesses. It's not that these publishers are evil, it's that 
> they are businesses whose institutional duty is to maximize profit, not 
> to benefit academia.

> Hence, partially inspired by the Journal of Buddhist Ethics and JGB, I 
> am working on an open access, peer-reviewed journal on Buddhist thought, 
> which in my view will nicely complement these two other journals. The 
> colleague with whom I'm working and I hope to have all the software 
> infrastructure functional by the end of 2009 and to have the first issue 
> out by the end of 2010. The most difficult part now is to find an 
> institution to donate server space or alternatively to find a grant so 
> that we can purchase server space somewhere.
> 
> Keep tuned for further announcements as we have more concrete details.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Alberto Todeschini
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