[INDOLOGY] Starting a new academic journal

Wed Aug 23 20:52:56 UTC 2017

Since it takes a couple of years for an article to go from submission to
publication in JAOS, the three-year paywall means that JSTOR readers are
reading five-year-old research.  Older, if you factor-in the writing and
research period before submission.

Plus, JSTOR membership itself isn't free.   Many of us don't notice this,
but a pandit in Thanjavur, for example, can't read the JAOS on JSTOR.

Best,

--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
,

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
,

Department of History and Classics <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
,
University of Alberta, Canada
.

South Asia at the U of A:

sas.ualberta.ca

On 23 August 2017 at 06:33, Lubin, Tim via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> I very nearly wrote in with a similar suggestion about journals produced
> by scholarly institutions and societies.  I will only add that the JAOS has
> the added virtue that it assigns copyright to authors.  Many of these
> journals are openly available on the internet (via JSTOR or Persée, etc.)
> with only the last 3 or 5 years protected to encourage subscription.  For
> JAOS, the “look back” is only 3 years.
>
> Best,
>
> Tim Lubin
>
> From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info> on behalf of
> INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info>
> Reply-To: Arlo Griffiths <arlogriffiths at hotmail.com>
> Date: Wednesday, August 23, 2017 at 3:14 AM
> To: INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info>
> Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Starting a new academic journal
>
> Dear Dominik,
>
>
> There is of course an another 'old model' (perhaps older than the one
> involving for-profit enterprises against which you protest): that of an
> academic institution or learned society running its own scholarly journal
> and publishing it wholly independently or with only marginal involvement of
> any for-profit enterprise.
>
>
> Some of our best and most venerable journals belong to this category. To
> name but five, from five different countries:
>
>
> Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
>
> Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient
>
> Journal of the American Oriental Society
>
> Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens
>
> Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
>
> I personally prefer to support and publish in these kinds of journals, and
> have wondered why colleagues feel the need to create new journals if
> excellent old ones already exist, outside of the for-profit publishing
> framework.
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
> Arlo Griffiths
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info> on behalf of
> Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, August 22, 2017 8:23 PM
> *To:* Indology
> *Subject:* [INDOLOGY] Starting a new academic journal
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> New academic journals spring up with surprising frequency.  Indeed, I
> launched one <http://hssa-journal.org> myself.  I am surprised, however,
> to see how many of the journals relevant to Indology still function on what
> I think of as the "old model," and are run as for-profit enterprises by
> commercial companies like Springer, Elsevier, Brill and others, whose first
> duty is not to the growth of knowledge, but to their shareholders.
>
> This problem of forked loyalty was starkly demonstrated this last week,
> when Cambridge University Press bowed to pressure from the Chinese
> Government, and voluntarily censored the content of its journal *China
> Quarterly,* withdrawing 300 articles that touched on topics sensitive to
> the PRC's communist government including the Tienanmen Square massacre and
> Tibet.  The reason given by the press was (in my words) that it was willing
> to sacrifice intellectual integrity for the purpose of continuing to sell
> the broad range of its products in the Chinese market.  The press has since changed
> its mind
> <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/cambridge-university-press-posts-censored-articles-170822075543589.html>
> as a result of widespread incredulity and outrage from the academic
> establishment.  It might be uncharitable to view it this way, but one can't
> help thinking that CUP continues make decisions based on the bottom line,
> and has simply decided that it stands to lose more by alienating its
> domestic academic market than the Chinese one.
>
> There are now robust alternatives to the old model.  For many years, the Public
> Knowledge Project <https://pkp.sfu.ca/> at Canada's Simon Fraser
> University has been distributing excellent free software for running
> academic journals.  From the technical point of view, it is really quite
> easy to set up and run an online, Open Access journal.  If one needs
> technical help, the PKP can provide advice.
>
> There are also important initiatives such as the Open Library of the
> Humanities <https://www.openlibhums.org/> that provide support
> <https://www.openlibhums.org/site/academics/journal-applications-to-join-the-olh/>
> for new or existing Open Access journals.  The OLH is important for two
> reasons.  First, it has a robust business model.  Second, it is alive to
> new and emerging forms of academic publishing, including the very
> interesting systems like archivX, PLOS, PeerJ, and JSTOR that have
> developed in scientific publishing. OLH is particularly inspired by PLOS
> <https://www.plos.org/>, and can partly be seen as a project to give
> humanistic scholars the kinds of benefit already enjoyed by scientists.
>
> If you are thinking of  launching a new journal, please look at projects
> like OLH.  They might provide everything you need, including adherence to
> the OA principles and the business models of the future.
>
> If you want to publish an article, think first of the Open Access journals
> might give you the peer-review, impact and quality that you are looking
> for.  The DOAJ <http://doaj.org> is an index of OA journals, and offers a
> lot of discussion and documentation about all the issues I raise here.
>
> Best wishes,
> Dominik
>
>
> --
> Professor Dominik Wujastyk <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
> ,
>
> Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
> ,
>
> Department of History and Classics
> <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
> ,
> University of Alberta, Canada
> .
>
> South Asia at the U of A:
>
> sas.ualberta.ca
>
>
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