What can you do?

There are two broad categories of kinds of actions one can take to support the open-access publishing. First, one can directly support it by publishing in open-acces venues, reading and citing materials published in open-access venues and so forth. Second, one can indirectly (but equally importantly) help to raise awareness of the issue.

Direct support:

The list of things one can do to directly support open-access publication can be broken down into to categories: the more-or-less easy things and the pretty-difficult things. A brief list of the easy things is as follows:

i) inform yourself about open-access publishing. One place to start is the Resources page.

ii) support open access publication by submitting some of your best work to open access venues -- only by getting a good selection of top research will open access venues become increasingly accepted as viable alternatives to commercial venues.

iii) support open access publication by diligently checking the current contents of open access journals -- if it is known that most philosophers willl actually see the TOC of open access journals, this will encourage more people to submit their best work to those venues. I plan, in the near future, to create a mailing list to which anyone can subscribe, that will distribute the new articles and contributions published in the relevant open-access venues once a month, so that all you will need to be done is to skim through one fairly brief email once a month to see if anything relevant to your own work has been published.

iv) support open access publication by citing and using articles published in open access venues where possible, as opposed to, or in addition to, those published in commercial venues. For example, if an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia is as suitable for some classroom or seminar purpose as a similar entry in a commercial encyclopedia, then put the open-access entry on the syllabus rather than the commercial entry.

v) support open access publication by taking material published in open-access venues seriously when making tenure and hiring decisions, and so forth. That is, don't simply assume a standard correlation between quality of work and the current presitge of the venue, but, for work published in open access venues, read that piece carefully and make an independent assessment (this is better in any case), or if the material is not in your field, ask a colleague who does know that field to read it careully and give you an honest independent assessment.

Those are five relatively easy things that anyone can do to help free ourselves from commercial interests. There are some more difficult things, difficult both in that the cost is higher, and also in that, for some at least, there may be some career risk involved. They are:

vi) not publish any of your original research in any non-open access venue. (Of course, co-authored work with people who are not professionally secure might be a well-motivated exception to this committment.)

vii) stop contributing to the commercial publication model (and its associated social evils) by giving it the resources of your time and expertise -- via refereeing, editing volumes, serving on editorial boards, and so forth.

These are difficult for obvious reasons. There currently aren't many open-access venues that carry significant prestige in our discipline, and so limiting oneself to publishing in open access venues is severly limiting the usual mechanism by which one tries to achieve success and status in our profession. Not easy at all to make this sacrifice. But in the spirit of leading by example, I have committed myself to all if (i)-(vii) above (see this page for more details on why).

It is my sincere hope that some of my professional colleagues -- especially established big-name senior faculty -- will be willing to follow me in this regard. It is this group that is both in a position to do the greatest good, since their work is what bestows prestige upon a publishing venue, and also faces the smallest risk, since they are already known, established, and secure.

Indirect support:

The second way to help, one that is in many ways much easier, is to assist in raising awareness. What can you do specifically? Help other people to raise their own lvel of awareness of this situation, and encourage them to take positive steps by exhibiting your own willingness to take positive steps. And in fact that is the main point of this website. There are other extant resources for learning about open-access publishing, and I don't want to replace or duplicate them. But they don't have an easy-to-remember URL, nor any snappy icons for awareness-raising purposes (think yellow bracelets or rainbow bumper stickers). So, I have put up this site, with an easy to remember URL, that can act as a gateway to the various resources that are already out there, and have made some small logos that can be easily added to email sig lines, web pages, title pages of powerpoint presentations, and so forth, that will help to get the word out that this is an important issue, and give people an easy-to-remember URL to point them in a direction that will help them learn more.

So if you can, please copy and use the following "I support Commercial-Free Philosophy" emblems as a means of showing your support (by doing something along the lines of (i)-(v) above) for open-access publishing. And if you are willing to make the sacrifice of doing (vi) and (vii) above, then please join me in using the "I am a Commercial-Free Philosopher" emblems.