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Why Is Science Behind a Paywall?
An anonymous reader writes "The Priceonomics blog has a post that looks into how so much of our scientific knowledge came to be gated by current publishing models. 'The most famous of these providers is Elsevier. It is a behemoth. Every year it publishes 250,000 articles in 2,000 journals. Its 2012 revenues reached $2.7 billion. Its profits of over $1 billion account for 45% of the Reed Elsevier Group — its parent company which is the 495th largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization. Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers.' The article also explain how moving to open access journals would help, but says it's just one step in a more significant transformation scientific research needs to undergo. It points to the open source software community as a place from which researchers should take their cues."
One could as easily ask "why are Hollywood Movies behind a paywall", or "why is food behind a paywall at my grocery store".
Working on my own distro of Viagra. I hacked in some cough drop medication and now I have a stiff neck.
Agreed. There has to be business model behind the research that goes into these breakthroughs, else none of this would ever get funded and there'd be no incentives for the scientists. And I think that's reasonably obvious to most people.
It seems to me the real question we're asking here is "how much profit should an organization be allowed to make for facilitating 'discovery' and how did we come to that judgement?"
The free arxiv.org servers hold most of science behind these paywalls, at least in physics and astronomy. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference in citation rank between paywalled papers on arxiv, and those that are not (and, thus, frequently unobtainable without payment).
The authors and peer reviewers need to be able to afford to live or they can't write!
I would love to see a good journal torrent site or similar crop up. Myself and my partner are often looking for medical and biology papers. We used to get login credentials from friends at decent Universities, but as we get older, this is getting harder.
I recently attempted to purchase multiple textbooks for a donation to a teacher offering a non-profit course, and was blocked from purchasing new textbooks because, according to Amazon.com, multiple purchases of a single book are forbidden by the publisher. Amazon.com had plenty of copies available, they just weren't allowed to sell them to me.
I contacted Elsevier on their website, and they were unavailing.
My response was to purchase used copies instead, for which the teacher was very grateful, but I had wanted to do better for her.
The end result was zero direct revenue.
It's important to keep people ignorant to increase and concentrate that power.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Irony at its finest meaning. (an author)
Because it costs money? Now if it was publicly funded, even partially, the results should be public.
FTFA:
Scientistsâ(TM) work follows a consistent pattern. They apply for grants, perform their research, and publish the results in a journal. The process is so routine it almost seems inevitable. But what if itâ(TM)s not the best way to do science?
- yeah, that's a false choice.
Private companies do science all the time because they need to push their knowledge forward to stay competitive.
By the way, who is preventing any scientist from publishing his papers anyway he or she likes at all? Who is standing in their way just throwing the stuff on some free Internet site, like, I don't know this or even this silly site?
You can't handle the truth.
FTA:
However, current scientific culture makes it hard to switch.
A history of publication in prestigious journals is a prerequisite to every step on the career ladder of a scientist. Every paper submitted to a new, unproven OA journal is one that could have been published in heavyweights like Science or Nature. And even if a tenured or idealistic professor is willing to sacrifice in the name of science, what about their PhD students and co-authors for whom publication in a prestigious journal could mean everything?
No one wants to be published by a no-name, and no one wants to let down their team mates by not trying for the most prestigious publishers. The big publishers have established a level of recognition, and since even scientists can be lazy and pass judgement on brand recognition alone, the fear of possibly being ignored because you didn't put 100% into self-promotion takes over.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The only reason scientists publish in journals behind paywalls is because they need the "Impact Factor" of the journal to put the publication on their CV so they can get better jobs and / or recognition among their peers. It's a vicious circle and one that science needs to leave
A few scientists organized an Elsevier boycott last year http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/01/27/1322234/scientists-organize-elsevier-boycott and I had an idea back then, which I copy and paste here:
"""
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and ‘sign’ those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your ‘worth’ goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
If a well known professor therefore signs your work, others will catch up to it. A ‘good’ paper will gain in publicity quickly due to being sent around a lot. One would also need to include a system of diminishing returns, as to avoid groups signing only their own papers. Ironing out these points of abuse will be the hardest part of this system.
The specification above only consists of four to five sentences and yet I would call it much more stable and open than the currently completely anonymous reviewing system.
"""
$19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics
University libraries account for 80% of their customers.
So what you're saying is that since the income of a typical university is 25% to 50% from tuition (and you can bet your ass that they justify the cost as providing access to students), that college students collectivly paid somewhere in the ballpark of $5 billion dollars to these companies.
Now... I'm all for helping out my fellows, and collective bargaining seems to bring down prices, but when I don't want what's being bargained for it kinda screws me over. As someone with an engineering degree who never needed to look in a journal to get his degree, I'm moderately miffed about that cost. And arguably, if there wasn't money there they'd probably just release all that info for free. Academics are big on that.
Worse than a paywall is the preposterous but ever more popular meme that lots of science should be secret so that terrorists can't get a hold of it and do blah blah blah. It is pure horseshit, but it will almost certainly gain enough political currency to be put into practice. For those of you foolish enough to take the contrary position, please note that scientific information has always been easily available in academic libraries. Making it secret would change the way science has been done for about 2 centuries or so. Also few, if any at all, recent terrorist attacks were informed by sophisticated scientific inputs. It is, in point of fact, pure unadulterated horseshit.
If 80% of their customers are university libraries, just how much has tuition gone up because of these takeovers?
Or how much grant money is lost to this?
It is tough to determine where to publish... It is in part the responsibility of the young publisher (scientist) to know the reputation of the journal(s) to which s/he publishes. Although there has indeed been a flood of brand-new and un-pedigreed online-only journals, it is really up to the researcher to decide where to publish. Indeed, there have existed for many years "vanity journals," and conference-"proceedings" journals, to which aspiring assistant Profs. can contribute, but which have impact factors of less than one.
Conference papers are one thing, but "real" publications are another thing entirely. Web-of-Science tries to explicitly avoid such gray-zone publications mentioned in a recent NYT article, and also, many top-tier journals do not consider "publication" in a conference proceedings to supersede, effectively, public dissemination of a work. That is, it doesn't count.
I can say, from the perspective of an early-career and young CV-builder, that it is very difficult to figure out which journals in one's particular field are preeminent and worthy of submission of good work, but also, which "outlets" are not worthy of disclosure of "new" work or results. To be safe, a lot of us youngsters just stick to APL and JAP, simply because we know that they are (a) reputable with reasonable IFs, and (b) because we know we can get good work published in them. Branching out to other journals is fraught with risks; publication-wise, it is a difficult lottery. But, as the NYT article puts it, and as anyone who has observed, for example, Elsevier's for-profit actions in publishing papers from vanity conferences, one can get just about anything into print, for the right price.
It is a significant risk, however, to publish in one of the new online-only journals. (What happens if they go bankrupt? Can you legally provide reprints?) The very real risk for anyone publishing in a for-profit online-only journal is, well, will your work be accessible in 10 years? 30 years? You grant a journal copyright when you publish, and in return, well, what do you get? Traditionally, you know that your work is in print in many scientific libraries across the world. But with an online-only and for-profit journal, you are granting them the same rights––are you guaranteed that your work will be accessible to all for the foreseeable future? No, you are not. When IP rights are in private control, they can change hands, at any time, as upon sale.
Long story short––The existing model of non-profits owning copyrights to half of scientists' work is the standard (odious as that may be), but, a move to for-profit and online-only journals will only exacerbate the situation. Your life's work could end up inaccessible to anyone, if a for-profit enterprise (like Elsevier) decides that making-available of copies of your work is not profitable. Remember, you grant the journal copyright... That is where these online-only, and for-profit journals are headed. This sort of thing has happened over and over again in the past, under copyright, with movies, scripts, musical recordings, etc. Do you want to put science under the same yoke of private ownership of dissemination?
Ask yourself: Should my work be made available for only 5 years? Or should it be made available in perpetuity to the readers of the journal to which I submit my work? Really, how valuable is your contribution? If in 50 years, there is someone with a question that can be answered by your work, should it not be available? (This is not fantasy. For example, space groups were fully developed 40 years before x-ray diffraction allowed the interpretation of crystal structures of materials based on diffraction-pattern symmetries.)
Do you want your discoveries either locked up in copyright limbo, or lost in a region of cyberspace gone fallow? No. Science is a progression, and should not be stunted by any potential lack of accessibility, short-term or long.
That is, OP, just agreeing with you that it's a problem, but one that hasn't found a solution yet.
When someone wants to spread knowledge, they give it away. When someone wants to limit knowledge, they paywall it, and make a culture of shame or lawsuits for anyone who gives the knowledge away.
I recently wanted to get access to a single article from a magazine for teachers because I wanted to do something different this time and the name of the article promised an interesting viewpoint.
However, my school did not subscribe to that magazine and it was an issue from 2004 to boot. So I went to Wiley's website and they offered me the option to buy a time-restricted access to that six(6)-page article. Yeah, you read that right: Shell out money and if you don't download the article as a PDF (which they offer, by the way) you lose access again. Doesn't really make sense but, hey...
Anyway, put that article into the "cart" and proceeded to the checkout. 40€. For a single article. From a magazine which costs 90€ per year if you subscribe to it as a private person (4 issues a year, 7-8 articles per issue). Where the articles are written by teachers for other teachers.
So I drove the 20 minutes to my local university after my school day had ended and photocopied the pages for 0.18€.
Screw those guys.
to keep the Mongols at bay, or course.
Free as in freedom software?
Working together has only ever generally yielded positive things.
Universities should be at the centre of society - not corporations.
Why is science behind a paywall? -- "revenues reached $2.7 billion."
Hmm. I guess we'll never know.
To be fair, the journal Science is run by a non-profit, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I think it's still behind a paywall, but I have less problem funding a non-profit that way.
The whole process, to date, is self-perpetuating, since serving as an Editor or Associate Editor for a prestigious journal also gets you points when you come up for promotion. As noted by others, serving in an editorial capacity or even as a reviewer for these journals is uncompensated. (You might think of it as falling into the same category as contributing voluntarily to an open source project.) The best that one can say for this activity is that it helps build an academic network, making it easier to obtain recommendation letters from senior faculty to include in your promotion case. The best way to disrupt this system in the short-term is for libraries refuse to renew their exorbitantly-priced journal subscriptions. (Money talks.) The high-quality online journals (e.g.,PLoS) have not yet made a significant dent against the biggest academic publishers.
Some guy (Aaron something, I think) asked the same questioning and got jailed for 30 years. Don't try to understand how really is the system, it hates that.
Justice does not happen by itself, and those who's job it is to ensure justice are just as vulnerable to corruption as anyone else.
The *only* way to ensure that you receive justice is to get up and fight for it yourself. You cannot rely on some other regulatory body to do it for you.
Corruption is the path of least resistance. If you want right to be done, you must resist.
Conventional publishing has one big plus -- you don't have to pay the journal. This is more important than it seems. Have a look at http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/. The rise of the web means anybody with a server can pretend to be a publisher if they can get content, so you have this huge bubble of low grade journals who charge the authors a few hundred bucks for the 'service' of reviewing and then publishing the article. Problem is since the journal needs articles for income, standards tend to be low, reviewing poor or non-existent, and the value to the author of this 'open access' publication is zero.
A conventional journal takes all the rights and gives nothing back, but (as someone who has published over 80 articles in places including Physical Review Letters) the quality of the review process is tangible and real. And this is partly because of the subscription model. Journals that are charging big subscriptions need to be of high quality. They need high impact factors, they need to make themselves key in the field so when times are tight and libraries are cutting the number of journals they take, your journal stays on the books. This encourages decent reviewing.
Open access is a great idea and I am all for it, but it needs a model where quality is guaranteed, which means the journal income does not scale with the number of papers they accept. Maybe we need to take it away from 'journals' as such, and have institutions themselves collectively sponsor something like arXiv but with a second tier for papers that have passed some kind of review process. This would have the added benefit of being a 'one stop shop' that could combine database search with article repository, and could be mirrored the way something like ctan or cran is.
Nature, another annoying paywall journal (but very good), had a detailed study about two months ago on the of publishing an article in both print and pure electronic forms. This even assumed reviewers work for free. They included editorial staff, printing, distribution, archiving and all that stuff. Journals recover costs through subscriptions, author charges, and society fundraisers. In one society I am in the annual commercial convention is the largest fundraiser.
I used to like to browse the print editions of journals in reserach libraries. These have shrunk by 80% - 90% as many libraries switch to as-much-as-you-can-electronic policy. Plus its difficult to get electronic browsing permissions if you are just a visitor.
Don't review for for-profit publishers, don't submit work, and found new open journals like JAIR and http://jcgt.org
Solution is easy: bring back copyright laws to the original terms. 14 years plus 14 year extension, and only for registered works.
I don't think a publisher will register each and every of the 250,000 articles, and even if, at least the article would be available after only 14 years. The scientists can still publish with a publisher, the publisher could still sell the articles, but the articles wouldn't be locked away for 200 years (or whatever the copyright terms are currently).
You wonder if the Mickey Mouse Extension Act of 1998 have any cost to the public? Here you have it.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
why should we be paying scientists as well?
Let's get one thing straight. Science in and of itself is not valuable. It is *more* than valuable. It can be used to *create* value, but there is a big difference there. Science is knowledge, and knowledge should be free and accessible to the public, so that that public can *create* valuable things from it. Just as you cannot put a price on 1+1=2, you cannot put a price on science. Science is invaluable. People who want to put a price on science are people that want to control knowledge for their own benefit.
Your point also applies to books that go out of print. If you can't get a copy, you're SOL.
Maybe laws should be passed putting all scientific papers in public escrow: if rapacious profiteering occurs or other market failure to provide copyrighted scientific works at a reasonable price, the Library of Congress makes it available online free.
I think $0.25 per page up to a maximum of $5 for an article is pretty reasonable, how about you?
--PM
They are involved.
I come here for the love
Either patrons or taxes or fees.. gotta pay for speculative research somehow.
See http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/10/04/1446216/for-academic-publishing-princeton-goes-open-access-by-default
IEEE makes the same thing. it robs authors of their rights and, even worse, prevents people from accessing research. BAD GUYS.
aaaaaaa
Because you've allowed free-market fundamentalism mean that the science research has to be "monetized" instead of funding it, because you decided to insist that private corporations could part-fund the research but get complete control over the result.
Because you decided not to fund it, it's no longer yours for free.
If they would not do everything to publish in those journals from those companies, the companies would have no chance to be evil.
But backbones are unfortunately rare things among scientists who will do close to anything to get funded and even more to get a high-impact paper published.
Basically, we value the laborer not at all, and we give all value to those who 0wn others.
So the grad student who did the work, basically will maybe profit, a little; the directing prof who basically gets the funding profits a lot; the university football team profits tons; the contracting companies profit even more; and Elsevier profits even more.
Meanwhile, the grad student may be able to access his own work in twenty years. Maybe.
The key to being an 0wn3r society, is that you have to reassign 0wn3rship from the ones who do the work, to l33ts who did nothing except party and drink, and tell the pols what good guys they are.
There's another word for an 0wn3r society: socialism. That includes both communism (Soviet/Chinese style 0wn3rs) and fascism (Naziism, and Us'ns' style of 0wn3rs).
Both types self destruct; so far, the self-destruction of fascism has been quite explosively violent. The self-destruction of communism has tended to be very criminal: though mafias, human traffic, and such. I am not sure that it has to be that way, but it may be.
0wn3r societies are both contrary to simple justice; but under simple justice, people don't have the hope of hitting it big, so that the whole world can see or be made to believe what hugely great a person he is. [Think of Putin, who has to be a sports star, a rock star, an astronaut, whatever.] So human wickedness tends to like 0wn3r societies, even when the person has no actual hope of being on top. Human wickedness has no grip on reality.
And since most humans are very much in the grip of their own wickedness [when's the last time you saw someone who *didn't* gossip? Who didn't defend themselves against unjust or partially just attacks?] then we're going to tend towards 0wn3r societies.
Enjoy the ride.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Paid access to knowledge is the biggest scam of the century. Scientists sometimes have to pay to have their papers published, and sign away their copyright. They are kept in check with the so-called peer-review process which ensures that they play by the rules: support the status quo (ie the money making machine), or we'll trash your reputation, or ban you from being published. That people can hold knowledge hostage to money is morally reprehensible.
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I visited scholar.google.com yesterday and they made it clear what it would take for them to find your work: .pdf extension, pretty much. So, if you don't publish elsewhere and they find it, then it is original.
I think the only definition of "original" that scholar.google.com does not fit is one where they are the only publishers of something. Not sure how many would even want that.
Seems they are doing a proper "google" here...vacuuming up any paper that any academic wants to have published. Sounds like "publishing originial research material" and then some, to me.
If I have cluelessly misunderstood you, please advise.
I come here for the love
Its all about the money.
Because they wan't to make it feel like pornography.
Researchers should sell journals a "License" that allows the journal to print the researchers IP, but the researcher still owns the IP and can sell other people the license as well.