Comments

• • Eric von Stackelberg@ericvo1

  

  Eric von Stackelberg September 28, 2012 - 9:52am

  Gusterson's premise suggests individual professor would be paid for the work. That only holds true if they are doing the work outside their university position otherwise the university (as employer) would get paid for the work. While that might be helpful for funding universities I suspect it would impact the working environment and as you suggest Open Access is likely a better solution that is both equitable and maintains the work environment.

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon September 28, 2012 - 8:09pm

  Gusterson's premise suggests individual professor would be paid for the work. That only holds true if they are doing the work outside their university position otherwise the university (as employer) would get paid for the work.

  Actually, the work of research is an expected core duty of a professorial position, but the remuneration for such work goes to the professor, not the institution; this arrangement - quite standard across most if not all research universities - reflects the traditional interconnectness and distinctions among an academic's main duties: research, teaching, and service. As a research university, AU, for example, claims copyright for any and all teaching materials I produce, like courses. But I retain copyright in and I get the payments (if any are forthcoming) for any and all research I produce, like articles or books. Academic culture recognizes that research and teaching are vitally linked and mutually constitutive, but the modern university recognizes that copyright and royalties provide strong incentives to produce excellent research and retain excellent researchers.

• • Eric von Stackelberg@ericvo1

  

  Eric von Stackelberg September 29, 2012 - 8:03am

  I understand that is the current situation. I maintain that the current relationship exists because the outside compensation professors recieved is more like a bonus that supports a positive university work environment than base compensation. if there was signficant monetary compensatiion (eg. Billable which should generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for each professor) as is an implied by what Gusterson's suggests then I expect the relationship between a professor and the university would change to something much more like that in a for-profit employer and employee. My personal opinion is that would be a bad thing both for the faculty and for society in that amount of money would destroy academic culture and sharing.

  So sum up my perspective. I believe the answer in this case of to certain entities in a process (eg. publishers) profiteering is not to increas and distribute the profits among all entities (eg. professors, universities, publishiners) but rather to decrease the financial incentive. Which is why I believe Open Access is better. It supports a culture of sharing while not eliminating the possibility of monetary bonuses for the professors.

   

   

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon September 29, 2012 - 11:05am

  Agreed; billable hours are decidedly not the answer. I've edited my prior comment to play down the importance of royalties for academic authors; anarguably stronger incentive - idealistic as it may sound - is the open dissemination of knowledge as a public good in its own right. Hence Open Access, yes. This open access ideal gains new force and urgency under a government regime that is systematically undermining and destroying what Janine Brodie calls Canadians' "social literacy" in a program of "manufacturing ignorance" (30). 

  See: 

  Brodie, Janine. "Manufacturing ignorance: Harper, the census, social inequality." Canada Watch Spring 2011. 30-31. http://robarts.info.yorku.ca/files/2012/03/CW_Spring2011.pdf

  ---. "On courage, social justice, and policymaking." Rabble.ca 16 Sept. 2012. http://rabble.ca/news/2011/09/courage-social-justice-and-policy-making