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."
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.
The authors and peer reviewers need to be able to afford to live or they can't write!
True as that may be -- if only the authors or peer reviewers got any of that money! But since they don't, your point is kinda irrelevant.
I have never made any money either submitting or reviewing for journals/conferences. I hear sometimes you even have to pay to get your work published (fortunately not in my field)
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.
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.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I was thinking more in the line of Journalwikipedia.org where people could publish under Creative Commons. And then others can review it and those reviews will be public too.
From a technical point of view, this should not be too hard. The hard part will be to be taken seriously and get some importand names on board.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There isn't. The money goes to funding the journals themselves and keeping the curation high-quality. Most research money comes from grants: either the government or an interested corporation. Some of the funding for those grants comes from technology transfer or profit, but most comes from tax money. As most subscribers to scientific journals are research institutions anyway, the model you describe would just move money back and forth between universities.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
"""
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.
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.
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.
Well, the part of the overall system that produces science is clearly *not* Capitalism (rather, depending on specifics, somewhere along the socialist to communist spectrum of organizational principles). Seizing profits from private corporations to use for the public good (through non-profit-seeking institutions) isn't Capitalism --- though it does seem to be an awfully great way to get world-class research done that private industry has no interest in providing. Yes, major sectors of the US economy are Capitalistic --- but, so far as the research sector is concerned, accumulation and investment for private profit is not the force driving production --- only the *subversion* of Capitalism, to expropriate private wealth for the public good, generates the immense wealth of scientific knowledge produced through publicly-funded research.
A whole lot of cutting edge research was done for decades in the USSR under communist rule --- you can argue that wasn't true communism, but it sure wasn't Capitalism either. One might likewise say that the Capitalist sector wouldn't be sustainable without drawing on an immense amount of support from anti-Capitalist institutions.
As a follow up, I'll note that I work in one of the arXiv-heavy fields (astronomy), and I never read any of the journals - nor does anybody I know. Instead we check for new articles ono the arXiv in the morning, where they appear the day after they were uploaded by the authors. There are usually 10-50 such papers per day in my field, depending on how narrow I want to be, and looking for interesting papers based on their titles and abstracts only takes a few minutes per day.
The immediacy this implies is a huge advantage which greatly speeds up the rate at which science is done. For example, a while ago a controversial paper was published on the arXiv claiming evidence for an exotic theory, and after 3 weeks 3 independent teams had attempted to reproduce their results and found no evidence for the claim. This turnaround is completely unprecedented in fields which rely on traditional journals, where one must expect to wait 6 months or so for the paper to be published.
While we don't read journals in my field, we still submit our papers to them, and do our best to have them published, because the journals still provide one important service: They coordinate the process of peer review. Sure, the peers are just other researchers like us, who do not get paid for their reviews, just like the journals do not pay us for our articles (in fact we have to pay quite a lot in page charges when our papers are published), but as it is, journals are the only way peer review is organized. Or put another way, peer review is the thin string in which the life of the traditional journals hangs.
The ideal solution for us in arXiv-dominated fields would be dedicated peer review services which would take over the role of coordinating peer review, but do so for free (after all, that coordination is less work than the free peer review itself), and which would digitally sign papers that have passed review. ArXiv could then display an icon on the pages of these papers, indicating which peer review service has signed the paper.
If this were put into place, and managed to get over the initial hurdle of building up a good reputation, then the traditional journals could be banished completely from our field.
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.
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
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.
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.