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An open-access academic’s shot across the bow of publishers

Nick Montfort, MIT Assistant Professor of Digital Media, has publicly announced that he is refusing to participate in peer-review processes for non-open-access journals (hat tip):

With regard to your request, I cannot agree to review for your journal right now. If [it] becomes an open access journal, I will be very glad to review articles for the journal.

Wow. Montfort is wrong elsewhere in the entry when he describes subscription journals as anti-publication (an easy way to turn John Willinsky’s spectrum of access into a hostile dichotomy), and I think this is a poor strategic choice to move more academic publications into the open-access world. But this may be an indication of a cultural divide among academics around access issues, and if so, Montfort is definitely on the radical side of the divide.