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."

Comments

Because it's valuable, duh.

[ron_ivi]

It has value, so someone wants to profit from it.

One could as easily ask "why are Hollywood Movies behind a paywall", or "why is food behind a paywall at my grocery store".

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's all well and good, except that most universities around the world are publicly funded in part by taxes. So your taxes pay for the research, and then you have to pay once more to be able to look at the results. If you had to have your credit card details ready when you made a 911 call, you might start to wonder what your tax dollars are actually being used for....

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[cheesybagel]

Totally different. Most of the effort here is actually done by people who do not get paid. This includes both the authors and the reviewers.

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[femtobyte]

I expect them to be paid the same way they already have been and are paid, which doesn't involve a cent coming from sales of their research articles. The for-profit journals don't funnel those billions of revenues back to scientists; they take them *away* from the scientific community (and into the pockets of profiteering investors). Replacing for-profit publishers with non-profit university and professional associations puts more money (and, more importantly, access to knowledge) back in the hands of scientists, without taking a single thing away from any scientist's paycheck.

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[whoever57]

Your argument make the incorrect assumption that an open-access approach would have the same costs that a closed-access model has. Much of Elsevier's costs are directly attributable to their sales model and would vanish in an open-access world.

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[pepty]

1. Done:

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

2. Done:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

(if you discount the value of immediate access to research, that is)

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[whoever57]

They still have to accept submissions, evaluate them, farm them out for review, decide which to accept, publish them, and then make them available in perpetuity.

But they don't do the evaluation and decisions on which to publish. That is done by unpaid reviewers and editors.

it's likely that "easy, free, open access" to 250,000 articles per year would require them to invest in significant upgrades of their infrastructure,

Much of their infrastructure is related to payment processing and restricted document delivery. None of that would be required in an open-access model. In addition, some of their costs are attributable to printing physical copies of articles, which would not happen in an open-access model (or could be done by a third party for payment).

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[femtobyte]

Creating "non-profit" university publishers will cost every taxpayer more money, because the people that will have to be hired to do this work will not be doing it for free, and instead of being paid for indirectly by grants (which can be taxpayer or private), they'll be on the taxpayer payroll.

As opposed to the taxpayer paying for all those things *plus* massive private profits by having private publishers do this? This will *save* the taxpayer money, because the taxpayer is *already* paying for all of Elsevier's work *and* profit margins.

IEEE is $185 a year, for which you get Spectrum and continual offers of life insurance. ACM is a more reasonable $99. ACS is $151.

Oooh, newspaper delivery prices! If $185 is "wacky" on your engineer's salary, you should consider looking for employers better able to use your skills than being a McDonald's fry chef. And, given my university's library budget for covering Elsevier's extortion costs, I'm (or, my research group) is already losing *way* more than $200 per person in journal costs.

Whether you like it or not, the professional publishers do provide a service that isn't free, so paying them for that service isn't unreasonable.

Paying for the actual costs of providing said services is reasonable. But Elsevier also gets this thing called "profit," where they rake in a billion dollars *more* than they need to pay for every single one of their own costs. They also arrange to provide services to maximize *profit,* rather than *services* --- at the expense of article availability to researchers. I suspect that, without the costs related to building elaborately paywalled restricted access archives, one could distribute Elsevier's content completely freely for a lot less than it costs to run Elsevier's profiteering operation.

If you want free journal articles, perhaps you should write the author and get a preprint?

Because maybe the author is dead, or might have better things to do than deal with personally handling the distribution of articles that a journal should be responsible for? If individual authors are supposed to handle archiving and distributing their own articles, then what are university libraries paying Elsevier's archive access extortion fees for?

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[meta-monkey]

Well, no, that's always been the way peer review works. You do work, submit it to a journal, and the journal has to decide whether to publish it or not. The editor can't possibly be as expert in every aspect of the field as people actively researching it, not only because everything is super specialized below the grain of the journal (i.e., you may be the editor of "The Journal of Bird Research," but you can't expect to be equally expert on ostrich mating and parrot evolution), but also because by definition, publishable papers containing new research contain things you haven't been able to know before. Also, you need independent active experts to review the paper to look for errors or quackery and to judge whether or not the research is relevant or compelling. So, peer review has nothing to do with whether a journal is freely available or behind a paywall. Even a freely published journal would still employ peer review in deciding which papers to publish and which papers to reject.

This article is about what happens after the publication. Whether the journal is freely available, or whether you have to pay to read it. Again, I think you're getting mixed up between "peer review" (part of the editorial process that helps determine which papers a journal decides to publish) and the manner in which papers are available after publication (freely available for download and distribute, or locked behind a paywall).

Papers being behind a paywall doesn't hurt the scientific validity of the papers published. Really, the problem is that it's rent-seeking dickishness on the part of the publishers.

In grad school I worked at a research laboratory and was co-author on a few papers. I was also a peer reviewer for a few. Really, they were sent to my faculty advisor, and he farmed out the work to the grad students. This wasn't a bad thing...of course he reviewed our reviews before sending them on, and we learned about the process and I did my part as a member of the scientific community. But yeah, papers containing the research we did at a public land grant University (meaning facilities paid for by public tax dollars) and under tax-funded grants from the National Science Foundation and the NSA, peer-reviewed for free by other researches like ourselves and accepted for publication are now locked behind paywalls. I actually can't download and read papers that have my name on them as co-author (assuming I didn't keep original copies).

Re:Because it's valuable, duh.

[femtobyte]

You missed the point that not all grants are tax-funded. Corporations also provide grants to do research, as do private foundations.

(a) what fraction is this in most fields? In particle physics (my own area), I've never seen any privately funded research --- but we're stuck with Elsevier journals.
(b) regardless, why should private grants paying extra for Elsevier's profits be any better? Wouldn't a private granter be happier paying less for non-profit journal systems, too?

Except there is no newspaper. There's a monthly magazine.

OK; you don't see the value in professional organizations. Others do --- including value beyond delivering magazines to our door, such as organizing conferences, scholarships, promoting research, even *providing journals better for the progress of science than profiteering schmucks.*

That's how capitalism works. People who risk money get to profit when the risk pays off.

And, when you lock in a monopoly position (such as is granted through exclusive intellectual property rights to journal articles), you can hoover up mega profits! Some of us don't think Capitalism is a good idea even in the *best* of cases, but this is the very *worst* of Capitalism --- the hideous face of monopolistic moneygrubbing.

The "extortion" fees are because they are making it more convenient for you to get the information, a service which costs real money.

Elsevier's profit margins are *absolute proof* that these services could be provided for at least 30% lower cost. With charges that range into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per institution for hosting a few tens of thousands of PDF pages of archive material, do you seriously think this couldn't be done ***way*** cheaper (such as at the rates consistently provided by non-profit journals, which are often ~10% of Elsevier's fees for similar services)?

false choices

[roman_mir]

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?

Re:Because that's how capitalism works.

[Hatta]

This is quite possibly the most ignorant comment I've ever read about scientific publishing. Capitalism has nothing to do with science, the vast majority of published research is funded through grants handed out by the government. Nobody does basic research for profit. The public has already paid for the research, all the products of that research should be completely free.

Elsevier sucks

[Sir Holo]

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.

Publishing in academic journals

[twasserman]

Anyone pursuing an academic career knows that there are certain journals that are considered prestigious. Publishing your papers in such journals (typically those of professional societies and many of those owned by Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley) is an essential part of the academic promotion process. Failure to do so means that you are unlikely to be promoted to a senior tenured rank (e.g., Associate Professor), and is typically the end of your stay at that institution. Publishing in some of the new "fake" journals is worse than useless, even though it pads your resume. Many fields also look down upon conference papers, though that is less of a problem in computer science where there are numerous highly selective and well-regarded academically-oriented conferences, such as the Int'l Conf. on Software Engineering. Not surprisingly, many of the proceedings for those conferences are published by Elsevier and Springer.

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.