I’m going to borrow a page from this book. I recently submitted that article I’ve been working on (ie, the rewrite of “The Tyranny of Open”) to the Progressive Librarian. It got bounced back right away ‘cause, well, I missed out on a few of the submission requirements (a few citations out of place ‘cause I tried to do use APA, even though I’m more comfortable with CMOS, and a missing abstract… all totally my fault for not reading the submission guidelines carefully enough).

Now, I don’t care so much about the rejection or being told to re-submit. I’ll be the first to own up to the fact that since it has been a while since I’ve written an academic paper, I’m out of practise (which is important for me because I’ve always been a bad writter, I can see in this paper more than a few of my old weaknesses showing through, but the problem is that, this time, I don’t have sufficient motivation to edit it the usual 9-10 it takes for my papers to be readable). And I remember looking at the Blue Monday submission requirements and it seems like more work than it is worth ensuring that the format is just right. It is an interesting thing, looking at the publishing racket from this angle. Allegedly journal publishing is all about that peer review ensuring the ‘worthiness’ or ‘value’ of your ideas. But forget an abstract and you’ll get terse-bordering-on-rude replies about submission guidelines.

The thing is… I’ve never been insecure about the value and worth of my ideas. I have good ones. I was (and am) a good scholar. I was never (and will never be) a good writer. I made my peace with this a long time ago. One of the things I like about blogging and all that is that a more informal style and not writing well doesn’t have disasterous consequences. I also really really like the fact that I can simply link to sources rather than dogmatically following a citation style guide.

So. I’ll focus on my blogging. And when I have something I like enough to expand on and research with greater depth, like the Tyranny paper, I’ll write up the article and self-submit to my instition’s repository.

In another sense… this is also me putting my money where my mouth is. I don’t really believe in the current academic publishing infrastructure¹. So. This is what I’ll be doing.

On that note, I’m happy to announce that the Tyranny of Open is available in YorkU’s repository. Enjoy!