I think Gil is right on this one: journal editors may be the primary people through whom this issue needs to be negotiated–at least, for purposes of fomenting more systemic change. Even so, though, I doubt that would settle the issue, since at least some veteran scholars are just as hungry to become journal editors, e.g., for purposes of promotion, as more junior people are to publish. In other words, I suspect many would be willing to make DRM and other types of concessions in order to get their journals off the ground, secure editorships, etc.

What’s left unexplored amid all this are the possibilities of publishing-on-demand, a technology which finally is serviceable. That is to say, I think there are ways to begin publishing scholarly work that would circumvent unnecessarily restrictive publishers altogether. That, of course, opens up the larger issue of credibility, i.e., whether one’s university would consider publications that don’t appear under the imprimatur of a university or commercial scholarly press as worthwhile. Nevertheless, it’s something worth exploring….

Keep fighting the good fight. I plan on mentioning your’s and Gil’s efforts during my talk at NCA (if you both don’t mind).

This is open to the entire internet universe at the moment.
So what on earth is the point of their digital rights management software?

So surely you should just put this link somewhere in the blog (let’s see if this actually comes out formatted as an actual link):
http://nms.sagepub.com/current.dtl

This may be a time-limited thing (it’s the page for the current issue), but it’s available to everyone for free (at least at the moment).

That said, I still think that the more effective wedge here is through journal editors. There are simply too many grad students and untenured faculty who need publications in order to get/keep jobs … and so Sage (or any other journal-publishing press) isn’t likely to feel too threatened by author boycotts, since they know they have a steady supply of authors to feed them publishable prose.

Journal editors, on the other hand, are in a much better position to control (or interrupt) the actual production of individual journals — and a press that really wants to “protect its investment” will probably be more inclined to listen to journal editors who threatens to quit their posts than they will to authors who threaten to submit their essays elsewhere.

Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t still raise as much hell as you possibly can, of course.