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For Academic Publishing, Princeton Goes Open Access By Default
First time accepted submitter crazyvas writes "Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers (except if a waiver is requested). The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication. Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. This is a bold first step in changing the face of how research (especially when taxpayer funded) works in the country, and a step towards weakening the current culture of charging increasingly exorbitant prices to view academic research publications."
The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.
Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.
The publishers are lying here to protect their cash cow. What maintains quality is the peer review system (which the journals do not pay for). The transfer of copyright to the publisher allows them to hold Universities to ransom - universities cannot function without access to the literature (present and past), and the costs of online access to journals have been spiraling over the past few years at a time when the publishers' actual costs are going down. After all, they don't pay for the research to be carried out, nor do they pay the academic editors or the reviewers, nor do they even need to typeset the document now that everyone submits a machine-readable copy.
Private academic publishers do extremely little for the exclusive copyright that they demand. Academics write the papers. Other academics peer-review them. Academics volunteer as editors and publicists. In most cases, none of these people are paid by the publisher for their work.
Increasingly, academic publications are digital only, meaning that literally the only service being provided by the publishers is to put the papers on a web site, behind a paywall.
Many academics that I know engage in "civil disobediance" and post their papers publicly anyway. Some publishers (notably the ACM) actually permit this. But most do not.
Princeton on its own won't be enough to change the system, but hopefully a few other big names will follow, and tip the balance.
As someone working in academia who knows the journal business well and is also a frequent anonymous peer-reviewer for an A-tier journal, I wholeheartedly welcome this decision. The publishers earn insane amounts of money for journals, yet practically all the work is done by unpaid volunteers. It's like a money milking machine and tremendously hinders research -- especially in poorer countries, because research institutions very often cannot pay for all subscriptions and have to make tough choices. At my working place in a not so rich country we cannot get access to many important journals and I frequently have to ask colleagues to send me some manuscript (which is embarasing, to say the least).
Before someone starts ranting about high-risk business, low volumes, they don't really make money etc. let me assure you that the majority of journals require authors to typeset the manuscript themselves, practically never pay for linguistic editing and do no editing in addition to what the voluntary peer-reviewers suggest to the author, and the rest of the typesetting is done as cheaply as possible (e.g. Springer commonly outsources to India -- fine for me, I like Indians and their country). Basically, the publishers do nothing - no proof reading, sometimes they don't even run a spell-checker, and make shitloads of money. One journal article USD $35 -- you get the picture!
and most importantly, paying not the author of the research, nor the institution that financed the author, but some random publisher who did virtually nothing.
The current publishing system really amazes me (and yes I'm an academic). This is wonderful news, I wish more institutions encouraged their researchers to go open access.