[INDOLOGY] Fwd: Starting a new academic journal

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Arlo asked me to share our correspondence with the list so that he can
continue in public.
Best,
Dominik


------------------------------
*From:* Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
*Sent:* Wednesday, August 23, 2017 8:46 PM
*To:* Arlo Griffiths
*Subject:* Re: [INDOLOGY] Starting a new academic journal

But Arlo, every journal you mention is pay-to-read.  One of the premises of
the OA model is that taxpayer-funded research should not be paid for
twice.  As the OLH site says (italics mine),

Since 1986, subscription costs for academic journals have risen by 300%
above inflation. In addition to exponentially increased research output
over this period this has triggered what is known as “the serials crisis”;
the inability of library budgets to keep pace with the prices set by
publishers.

Simultaneously, it has been realised that* putting research behind paywalls
*is both unjust (especially if the research was funded by the taxpayer) and
also unhelpful; scholarly and scientific practices are not advanced by
restricting access. This led to the rise of the open access movement. Open
access is traditionally schematized into two routes: green and gold. The
former means that access is made open through the author depositing a copy
of their article in their institution’s repository. The second means that
the journal itself is open and free to read.


Several "even-older-model" journals like the BSOAS, the JRAS, and *Medical
History* could once have been included in your list, with ABORI and the
others.  But most regrettably, they sold their journals to Cambridge
University Press.  (The example of Medical History is complicated, because
it is both free and paywalled simultaneously.)

Best,
Dominik


On 22 August 2017 at 22:35, Arlo Griffiths <arlogriffiths at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>


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