Slashdot Mirror
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."
...and when it is free it's value is even greater. duh.
Does it even qualify as scientific knowledge if it's not freely available for peer review?
Who ordered that?
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.
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.
"""
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.