What is the distinction between an online, open-access scientific essay and a well-reasoned blog post? There are some similarities. Both may be classified as intellectual discourse; both may freely give well-articulated and well-researched material; and both may appear comparable in a Google search. But just because they look similar does not guarantee they are. Refereed articles hold substantially varied value in scholarly contexts. A scholar’s impact, notoriety, and originality are frequently used to assess their career chances, curriculum vitae, promotions, and tenure. The purpose of this work is to challenge the notion that academic legitimacy is only found in expensive books printed by commercialized presses and available only to research organizations. If our academic community can reach an agreement on the political importance and social value of open scholarship, food studies will immediately become a more inclusive, varied, and less exclusive academic area. I suggest that an open scholarly road combines the speed, openness, and inclusivity of online publishing while maintaining academic authority.
The Graduate Journal of Food Studies (GJFS) is one such example of open scholarship. As the Scholarly Communications Coordinator for the Graduate Association for Food Studies (GAFS), I will explain some of the decisions we made with the Graduate Journal of Food Studies to build a paradigm for open food studies scholarship that is not bound by historical academic norms.
A Brief History of How Open Scholarship Began
You may or may not realize it, but the systems in which we perform bibliographic research are skeuomorphs—something new that incorporates design elements from the past primarily to provide the user with comfort. Scholarly databases replicate the pre-digital publication system by arranging articles within journals that are released chronologically in volumes and issues. According to Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, “the digital revolution did not alter the form of the scholarly journal.” PDF became the standard format for electronic journal articles, mirroring the print format. The digital revolution has had considerable impact on the economics of academic publishing and the journal market.[1] Although publishers retained control of the journal market, their expenses were dramatically cut by eliminating the need to bind and distribute physical things.
Since the beginning of digitization half a century ago, the scholarly information distribution market has seen significant consolidation. Monopsonist publishers pay little to no remuneration for (highly qualified) intellectual labor, then sell this work (together with confidential information related to it) to technological companies at a preposterous premium. Companies in these areas, like the rest of the publishing and technology industries, are constantly merging and acquiring one another. Between 1973 and 2013, the top five largest academic publishers’ market share more than doubled, rising from 10-15% in 1973 to more over 50% four decades later. Since 2013, five publishers have published more than half of all scholarly articles. The same goes for businesses who offer access to the scholarship. As of 2020, Cambridge Information Group, which owns the ProQuest brand, accounted for 50.4% of the academic library technology market.
Many researchers have called for a push toward openness in order to reduce the financial stranglehold these sectors have on academia, including open access, open data, open textbook publishing, and others. This openness aims to demonetize the publishing bottleneck by providing multiple options for freely sharing and disseminating information on the internet.[4] Open scholarship has the potential to produce the same intellectual impact, prominence, and even fame as conventional scholarship. However, rather of manifesting through journal revenues, it would emerge through more open, crowdsourced, and collective means: citations, clicks, downloads, and sharing. Open scholarship is unquestionably a political endeavor. By removing our journal content from traditional institutions, we are helping to reshape the concept of who can publish and what publication entails.
A Closer Look: Comparing Conventional and Open Scholarship
Let’s compare a well-reasoned blog post to an academic essay in an online publication. One distinction is in its accessibility and discoverability. When choosing a format for posting written content, the tried-and-true blog template is familiar, comfortable, and hence an obvious choice.And that makes sense. Blogs are easily searchable, and their information is organized into posts or pages. The format, which is so natural to our experience with the internet, has become integral to it.
The approach to browsing scholarly literature is different. It usually starts with a library website, which is commonly the entry point for accessing institutional subscriptions. Then one must discover the book or journal in which the article is published. Finally, and this is the most strikingly different element of the process, one navigates to a journal or e-book database that has the desired article, which can be read or downloaded. Rather than simply going to nytimes.com to read New York Times articles, you will use a third-party platform to find and obtain the information you need. This third party bundles millions of articles and other materials and then sells limited access to them.
This system has several essential advantages. Databases, for example, have great knowledge of what is contained within a package and can control quality. Peer-reviewed content can be distinguished from popular and commercial content. No random crazy uncle can submit rants inside a database. The information is sought out and verified.
