Let’s get in the game
While AoIR studies participatory culture, Internet researchers themselves should participate in open-access publishing. Walk the talk in our scholarship.
Jenkins: you make the content, companies keep the wealth.
This is true of private academic journals, too. There’s no reason why this should be anymore.
10-15% of academics make their work publicly available, yet we all agree to serve the community and public sphere don’t we?
It’s not that technology is in the way; no system would make it easy enough for us to participate without a culture of participation.
Three impacts of open access:
- scholarship – increase readership/citations
- professional – would help us do the work we need to do if information that we need to know was more readily available
- personal – academic freedom
“Sharing is caring.” Jenkins
Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is one such open-access system.
Also, any scholar who critisized the validity of Wikipedia is ironic since scholars are best equipped to make Wikipedia more trustworthy.
And pre-prints and post-prints of articles are usually okay to post online. Most scholars just don’t know.
In short, academics should do a better job of making their research available to other scholars and the general public. We have an obligation to do so, and it is hypocritical of Internet researchers not to do so since we study participatory culture.