From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:48:14 -0700

Interesting article from Al Jazeera English on the increasing
percentage of faculty (76%) on the adjunct track, many below the
poverty line, and the potential implications of trends like MOOCs and
automated grading systems on academic labour:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134119156459616.html

What does this have to do with scholarly publishing? The whole system
depends on the free gifts (see note) of academics of their articles
and peer review services, not to mention conduct of research in the
first place. If the system that supports the researchers is melting
beneath our feet, what future is there for scholarly publishing, if
any?

Note: acknowledging that these gifts are not always free, sometimes
royalties are involved, particularly for books, however even here they
are so far below actually paying people to do the work and write the
results that this is still primarily a gift economy for the scholar.
If you take a sabbatical at partial salary to write a book and get
royalties amounting to a small fraction of the salary differential,
both you and your university employer are heavily subsidizing the book
production.

best,

Dr. Heather G. Morrison
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com