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

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.

[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).