Batterbury SPJ. 2017. Socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals. Fennia: international journal of Geography. 195(2): 175-181 DOI: 10.11143/fennia.66910
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This may be the most important article I have ever written (although not the longest). Academic publishing needs change, and prefiguring that change has implications for hiring committees, senior academics, and scholars of all types. Part of a Reflections series on academic publishing in geography.
Abstract: There have been a range of protests against the high journal subscription costs, and author processing charges (APCs) levied for publishing in the more prestigious and commercially run journals that are favoured by geographers. But open protests across the sector like the ‘Academic Spring’ of 2012, and challenges to commercial copyright agreements, have been fragmented and less than successful. I renew the argument for ‘socially just’ publishing in geography. For geographers this is not limited to choosing alternative publication venues. It also involves a considerable effort by senior faculty members that are assessing hiring and promotion cases, to read and assess scholarship independently of its place of publication, and to reward the efforts of colleagues that offer their work as a public good. Criteria other than the citation index and prestige of a journal need to be foregrounded. Geographers can also be publishers, and I offer my experience editing the free online Journal of Political Ecology.
FENNIA is a non-profit peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Geographical Society of Finland since 1889.
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