View From a Provost’s Office

James V. Maher, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor, University of Pittsburgh, recently published “The Research University and Scholarly Publishing: The View From a Provost’s Office” in ARL Bimonthly Report, December 2006.

In this short though interesting report on scholarly publishing Provost Maher strikes a provocative note when he refers to what he terms “the intimidation of faculty that has gone on by some of the journals. I know that attempts to get the faculty engaged and to use the faculty’s inherent strength to deal with problems of scholarly publishing—in particular, access constraints due to the common practice of transferring copyrights to publishers—have really been thwarted by the faculty’s fear that the journals would not publish their work and that, particularly, they wouldn’t be able to get their work into the right journals. But many faculty have tried, albeit fitfully, to have an influence, and their positive results are most evident in the improved cooperation exhibited in recent years by many of the scholarly societies. Intimidation of the faculty is a real thing and must be dealt with by anyone who sincerely wants to work on this problem and who wants to try to work with the faculty to solve these problems.” Click here for the full article.