[sramsay]

I'm a humanities scholar, and I have given talks where I basically hit every single point you make (we tend not to typeset our own work, and we create more book-length monographs, but aside from that . . .). I consider the situation to be essentially obscene, and so I make various arguments about open access, universities as "self publishers" of their own faculty's work, and point out that absolutely none of this requires abandoning peer review.

Honestly? You would think I had suggested that we close the doors of the university. I'm not about to let Elsevier or Pearson off the hook, but we (members of the ACM, the AHA, the MLA, etc.) are our own worst enemy when it comes to the existing model. I am constantly astonished at the way my colleagues' defend this abusive system. Though "defend" might be too strong a word for what is actually nothing more than an incoherent mixture of elitism and the belief that we have always done things a certain way because that way is certainly right.