[Buddha-l] "the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world" - academic journal publishers?

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Thank you, Sally, that was lovely! While frustrating, it was also emotionally liberating to read such a succinct limning of the dysfunctional situation in academic article publishing. Recently, I've had back-and-forths with Artur Karp of this list, lamenting our lack of access to expensive journals, and with a Ven. Pandita, who has some relatively developed ideas about creating a Buddhist studies research repository, something along the lines of arxiv.org.

Thanks also, Sally, for mentioning the Journal of Global Buddhism <http://www.globalbuddhism.org>. We (along with our older sibling, the Journal of Buddhist Ethics) are proud of being on what we think of as the "right" side of this issue since our founding. And we've been around for a dozen years now. When we started, we thought we were simply leading the pack and our (non)-economic model would shortly sweep the capitalist dinosaurs from the field. We were crashingly naive. There has been no fundamental change whatever in who profits from donated scholarly work. Money continues to flow from students, scholars, and universities to corporations and knowledge continues to remain a commodity rather than a resource. And, of course, when knowledge becomes a commodity, the laws of reason no longer control it, the laws of capitalism do. Very sad. No, more than sad: if something can be said to be evil, surely it is something like this.

Cheers anyway,

Franz