Institutions have been paying these high costs for a long time through outrageously high subscription prices. At the same time, the scholarly journals demand all rights from their authors. I believe institutions are beginning to see that the money they pay for subscriptions can just as easily go to providing open access, so that everyone can save a lot of money by cooperating.

The reputation of a journal is based on its own history of publications and who publishes in it, not on the quality of its publishing house, which is often far removed from any of its scholarship. As more scholars want to publish in some of these open-access journals, it will simultaneously become more prestigious.

Boyd’s over-stated rhetoric (which she acknowledges in her post is “simplistic”) diminishes her case. Open access is a business model, not an ideology. Publishing has costs. It is certainly possible for anybody with an internet connection to make their work available for free, or for a group of like-minded people to create an OA journal as a labor of love. But for most scholars, those are not good long-term options. Publishing well requires consistency, quality control, and either time or money.

I sympathize with her wish to move us away from dependence on high-priced journals from corporate publishers, but believe that her boycott won’t strike a chord with those who see the problem as more complex than Boyd does.

We’re certainly in a period where authority metrics are changing, and online disaggregated access to scholarship has played a role in that. But scholars still rely on the reputation of the journal as a measure of its quality. But there’s no clear formula (OA=labor of love, subscription=profit-driven).