[Buddha-l] Useful for Enlightenment?

[Alberto Todeschini]

Piya Tan worte:

"Thanks Katherine, it's great that JGB allows free downloads of its
article. I've always enjoyed reading Makransky's works. He has a long
papers in the issue you mentioned."

Hi Piya,

Your comment points to an issue that I feel strongly about:

- an average size-university (I'm thinking of the University of Virginia 
where I currently am) spends around $4000000 in a single year for 
e-subscriptions;

- for-profit publishers (especially 4 large companies, whose behavior 
has been described as monopolistic by a copyright lawyer whose talk I 
recently saw)) made $ 15 billion (!) in 2008 alone in subscriptions. 
This is all money flowing out of higher education;

- poorer universities/institutions/individuals can't afford to subscribe 
to journals or even buy individual articles, which sometimes are priced 
at $40-50 for a single PDF;

- we in the West write about Buddhism and people in many Buddhist 
countries can't afford to read what we write;

- in spite of the enormous financial revenue, publishers have produced a 
very small amount of innovation and inventiveness. In fact, some of them 
provide services that are mediocre at best.

Hence, I encourage people to look at open access:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)

It always pains me when new journals are launched and editors decide to 
go for the old model of doing things, which further shackles academia to 
greedy businesses. It's not that these publishers are evil, it's that 
they are businesses whose institutional duty is to maximize profit, not 
to benefit academia.

Hence, partially inspired by the Journal of Buddhist Ethics and JGB, I 
am working on an open access, peer-reviewed journal on Buddhist thought, 
which in my view will nicely complement these two other journals. The 
colleague with whom I'm working and I hope to have all the software 
infrastructure functional by the end of 2009 and to have the first issue 
out by the end of 2010. The most difficult part now is to find an 
institution to donate server space or alternatively to find a grant so 
that we can purchase server space somewhere.

Keep tuned for further announcements as we have more concrete details.

Best,

Alberto Todeschini