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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."
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....
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.
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)
Authors are paid next to nothing. I've published a paper by Springer which is currently selling for $40 for a download. Guess how much I got paid? $0 (and even had to sign a huge contract detailing the terms of my $0 compensation).
Scientists publish papers because they need credit, references, public claims on their discoveries etc. Big-name scientists may actually earn something if they negotiate it.
The only reason I see the publishers get such a huge compensation is that they have to review papers (probably hire scientists from similar fields) and deal with the incoming stream of bullshit articles.
But they don't do the evaluation and decisions on which to publish. That is done by unpaid reviewers and editors.
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).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!