I found a new, important journal in international affairs called Global Responsibility to Protect which I an strongly recommend no one uses or cites because of it has chosen to buy into a dying model of academic publication. Read on and I’ll explain why I have problems with paying $35 for an article.
The principle of Responsibility to Protect is that a state has a responsibility to protect it’s citizens from atrocities, and where a state is unable or unwilling to do so, the international community has a responsibility to step in and act. Responsibility to Protect (shortened to RtoP or R2P) is a doctrine in international politics which is generally traced back to a 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty which is freely available on the web. The concept has made rapid progress and was endorsed by the UN General Assembly. It represents a shift in the idea of state sovereignty from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility; a concept which was memorably enunciated by Frederick the Great when he described himself as ‘first servant of the state’ although many leaders and academics since then have found it convenient to forget that dictum.
R2P is a concept which is important. It bears on many current crises, and it has developed a weight and maturity which means that I need to include it in my teaching on International Organisations. It has spawned several research centres, and at least one journal.
If you Google R2P, one of the top hits is the journal Global Responsibility to Protect which bills itself as “.. the premier journal for the study and practice of the responsibility to protect (R2P).” and it may well be – the Tables of Contents look good, and so does the single issue that is freely accessible online. Unfortunately, ‘freely accessible online’ only runs to that one issue. Like many other academic journals, GR2P is locked behind a subscription paywall, tied up by a major academic publisher and a provider of online journal access. I’m not naming either – both the publisher and the database provider are no better or worse than many others in the same game.
If you are in a university whose library subscribes to that database and includes GR2P in its package, you may download every article for free – except that is free in the sense that your institution has already paid for it. If not, you can buy each article for $35.
Yeah.. you read it right — $35 plus tax for 1 article.
As most people in the academic world know, the people who get that $35, the academic publishers and providers of the online service – do little more than run a database server. The academics who write the articles, review them for publication and edit the journal get none of it. It seems more than a little unfair and wasteful. if you are a researcher, or a research institute in peace research, you probably have better things to do with $35 dollars right now - go to Oxfam and donate it to Haiti, for example. It has been clear to many people that the economic model for academic journal publishing is seriously broken, and this is why there is a growing moment to publishing academic research in Open Access journals or repositories.
One might expect, therefore, that a group of academics working on a new, progressive field in international relations theory who wanted their research widely disseminated and cited, would consider going down the open access route rather than locking their research in the belly of the dinosaur of commercial academic publishing.
Well, they made what I think is a very wrong choice, and sold out to commercial interests. Even if they change their mind, they are probably tied into a multi-year contract, and those articles which have already been published probably “belong” to the people currently charging $35 per article for access. As a result those articles, which may be important for charting the emergence of this new concept, may well be paywalled for years to come.
And the irony is that despite it’s high Google ranking, the journal is not widely available to the people who need it. Over the past weekend, I have had exchanges by email between ex-students of mine looking for it in several university libraries, but to no avail. We don’t have it in UCC (and I won’t be requesting it) and it can’t get had in several UK universities which have strong programmes in International Relations or Peace Studies. For the people who wrote for the journal, and whose academic productivity is assessed by the impact of their research based on the numbers of citations they get, this is bad news.
If my library had online access to the journal, I could pull the articles out of it and email them to the people who need them. However, it is a very easy choice for me not to do that – if I did, those articles would get citations which they don’t deserve. They made their choice, and I wouldn’t want to create citation reports which made it appear that we paid money to support their choice.
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