3/21/2009 05:13:00 PM

Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists. Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the "influence" of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; "impact factor" relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.

...There is an assumption that if something is "published" (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available. Ironically, it may actually mean the opposite. It may be "circulating" among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion). It doesn't take a PhD to see how bizarre the math works for the academic knowledge economy. Somehow, the fewer people that know about and use your scholarship, the better it must be. Does that follow? It does within the solipsistic logic of the closed knowledge economy that fuels Intellectual Apartheid.

...there is a well-established IF (impact factor) rating system.

Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.

Scholars who let their work be kept from broad dissemination by allowing its access to be tightly restricted through commercial means are complicit with Intellectual Apartheid. It's a shame, really, for such scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals.

Academic Evolution