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Why Johnny Can't Speak: a Cost of Paywalled Research
theodp writes "That there's no easy way for her to get timely, affordable access to taxpayer-funded research that could help her patients leaves speech-language pathologist Cortney Grove, well, speechless. 'Cortney's frustration,' writes the EFF's Adi Kamdar, 'is not uncommon. Much of the research that guides health-related progress is funded by taxpayer dollars through government grants, and yet those who need this information most-practitioners and their patients-cannot afford to access it.' She says, 'In my field we are charged with using scientific evidence to make clinical decisions. Unfortunately, the most pertinent evidence is locked up in the world of academic publishing and I cannot access it without paying upwards of $40 an article. My current research project is not centered around one article, but rather a body of work on a given topic. Accessing all the articles I would like to read will cost me nearly a thousand dollars. So, the sad state of affairs is that I may have to wait 7-10 years for someone to read the information, integrate it with their clinical opinions (biases, agendas, and financial motivations) and publish it in a format I can buy on Amazon. By then, how will my clinical knowledge and skills have changed? How will my clients be served in the meantime? What would I do with the first-hand information that I will not be able to do with the processed, commercialized product that emerges from it in a decade?'"
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
NIH funded research must be put into PubMed Central, the NIH public portal, within 12 months of publishing in a journal.
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
The United States has become a nation of public financing and private profits.
I believe the intent... is that all healthcare practitioners do not have private practices, but are instead employed by large healthcare conglomerates like Connecticut Life, United Healthcare, etc., and that those conglomerates have online access to the journals from their networks.
As long as you do not hang out your own shingle, and remain a wage-slave to a large corporation, you will have no problem accessing the necessary publications.
She does explain that the problem is there's no guarantee that any of this information will be useful ("Topics in Language Disorders, for example, has a $122 subscription for four issues. But there's no guarantee that the articles I'll get in the four issues next year will be useful for me-and that's just one journal!"), and goes on to suggest she'd consider shelling out thousands for unfettered access, but that's not an option ("Even if I had to pay an acceptable yearly fee-if for $300 a month I could access everything-that would be better than how it is today).
No, no, no: Swartz was able to download JSTOR articles at all because, as a research fellow at MIT, he had the exact same kind of access agreement. All he did was scrape stuff from the JSTOR site using that access. The submitter was wrong to write that portion of the summary.
...and at any rate, (most) NIH-funded research must become publicly accessible via PubMed Central within 12 months of publication, so this, too, is something of a non-story. Paywalls aren't quite as thorough (or elite) as we sometimes think.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expenses, and that academics provide the important parts of the service, essentially for free in the cases of most journals. It's not like putting out a magazine; we didn't even have copy or layout editors for our journal, the most inexpensive components of editorial labor. It paid the university department that hosted the journal a mere thousands (single digits) per year. There were two "paid" staffers—myself and one other person, The rest of the "editorial board" consisted of faculty of our and another several universities doing the work for free, under the auspices of the "professional duties" of the academics involved (not as paid by Springer, as paid by their respective institutions). Peer reviewers—free. Editorial labor (copy, layout to production files according to specs, submissions queue, even rough line editing, style work)—graduate students looking for a title to add to their emerging CVs.
Essentially Springer's total cost for putting out the journal amounted to the several thousand (again, single digit thousands, split between myself and one other individual) that they (usually belatedly) paid our department annually for the entire journal in its substance, plus printing/distribution (a pittance given the circulation size of academic journals and the cost per print subscription—not to mention the increasing number of electronic-only subscriptions). They had one liason that handled our entire "account," and the level of labor involved allowed this person to be "over" several _dozen_ journals as just a single person. That's as much a labor footprint, in its entirety, as our journal actually had inside the "publisher."
And for this, they held onto the reprint/reuse rights with an iron fist, requiring even authors and PIs to pay $$$ to post significant excerpts on their own blogs.
Seeing the direction the wind has been blowing over the last half-decade, the department decided (and rightfully so) that it's basically a scam, that academic publishing as we know it need not exist any longer, and wound down both the print journal and the relationship with Springer several years ago, instead self-publishing the journal (which is easy these days) to much higher revenue for the department, and the ability to sensibly manage rights in the interest of academic production and values, rather than in the interest of Springer's oinking at the trough on the backs of academics.
Oh, and many university libraries (particularly in urban areas) do not admit just anyone off the street; you must generally hold an ID that grants access to the library (often student or faculty, plus a paid option for the general public, either monthly or annually, that can vary from somewhat affordable to somewhat expensive). Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacks—and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
As an academic, I have the same frustration. We bemoan the state of science in this society, yet under the existing publishing model we essentially insure that only a rarefied few scientists and the very wealthy elite have access to science at all. $30-$60 is not a small amount for the average person—and that is the cost to read _one_ article, usually very narrowly focused, and of unclear utility until they've already paid the money, that is borderline unreadable for the layperson (or for the magazine author hoping to make sense of science _for_ the layperson) anyway. Why, exactly, would we expect anyone to know any science at all beyond university walls, under this arrangement?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Nothing yet. I ended up emailing a professor of mine from school, and I'm waiting to hear back from her, while at the same time asking her, "Is there a more reasonable way for me to do this?"
Some people told me to go to the local medical school library and download the articles from there. I don't know if it's feasible for me to go to a library of a school I don't go to! And at the moment, I don't really know any students who I could ask.
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States,
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
/Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't. When enough people do this the present journals will change their policies or be left out of the market.
Right now your trying to be the tail that wagged the dog. Stop being the tail and start realizing that there are far more academics than journals and organize a new journal. With the Internet it is absurdly easy to communicate with like kind peers and set up a self publishing site for very little money.
At some point you have to realize that the journals need the academics more than the academics need the journals. A small number of professional journals are holding up millions of academics. Stop being the tail, start being the dog.
Whether or not taxpayer-funded research should be accissible to the taxpayers for FREE is a matter to be acertained, but the fact is that it is no longer possible for anyone, including the professional researchers, to know where to find the result of the various facet of related research on a given field.
It is as if we are back to the pre-Internet days.
Before Internet, it was a Herculean task to find out if there had been a research carried out on any particular subject, simply because there was no one central database.
When Internet first arrived, the situation was greatly improved - although there were still no centralized database for all research results, at the very least we could search for it online.
Now ?
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Paywall does not only representing GREED that is retarding the progress of the human society, it is actually STRANGLING the progress of scientific research.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Lots of universities simply can't afford all the journals they ought to have.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
should it not be as simple as a wiki?
There does exist a site for uploading preprints called arXiv. The difference is that preprints aren't peer reviewed and thus aren't quite as citable in publications that strongly prefer "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy".
I actually don't know. I have the luxury of having institutional access to a full range of print and electronic subscriptions. But even if they do, think about what you're asking a busy professional to do.
People are suggesting that she should just pony up $thousands annually, that she should dedicate days to travel and research, as apart from patients or family, when there's no necessary technical reason to do so, and now, with ILL, that she should stick to a research project about a case or two for the many weeks that it takes to make ILL work.
Sure, there's ILL, and it may well work as it used to (though I doubt it for electronic resources, based on the ways that licenses right now are written). But we're asking her to stick to a project for $thousands and $weeks of constant attention. She's a professional. She is busy. And she ought to have access. The point is not to ask, "can it, plausibly, be done?" but rather "what is science for, and is this the way that it ought to work?"
We made society, as human beings. We can make it better. I'd suggest that this is a case in which it can be made to function much, much better than it currently does. The goal behind having therapists of all stripes is to help people to overcome real problems, not to test the therapists to see whether or not they can navigate arcane social structures and processes. We should make their jobs as easy as possible. Hell, this applies to virtually every job title. Jobs exist for a reason—because there is demand for what they do, because we value it. Why not, then, make the jobs of professionals as plausible and as easy as possible, rather than risking their doing a much worse job simply so that a few corporations that produce little of value (the value in academic publishing is produced by the academics and the researchers, not by the publishers in the era of easy print-on-demand and easy online access) can earn a decent chunk of change.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It's been my experience that access to non-US journals may not be so restricted. I've found relevant articles in UK journals for instance that aren't paywalled when the equivalent US journals were. Not all countries or scientific organizations are as greedy as they often seem to be in the U S. Unfortunately, you may have to find a translator or wing it with translation software if it's not an english-language source, but at least there are a few alternatives out there. And if you're a scientist in the US, you may be able to submit your papers to non-paywalled sources, possibly in addition to the paywalled ones, or host the papers on your own website, etc., making them more accessible. Paywalled sources are not the only game out there, you may just have to dig a little more.
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that? CAS Scifinder and STN (subscription based services) will get me more granular results than Google Scholar, but I find plenty of paywalled results when I use Google Scholar or PubMed. What is being blocked?
A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Oh, but who has time to go there, find a place to park and then run around the stacks...?
Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for your career instead of always whining about how things should be made better just for you. The journals charge money because they incur substantial expenses for providing an important service.
I went through that bullshit of trying to get access to university libraries.
First of all (at least in New York City), university libraries aren't open to the public. They charge their own students a $2,000 library fee so they don't let outsiders in for free.
Second, even when I did pull strings to get special accommodations to use a library on a guest basis, it was basically a day's work to look things up in the stacks when everybody else is getting them in 5 minutes online (as I do now with access to some academic databases).
Sometimes you have to find out what's going on in reality before you give sermons accusing people of "whining" when they're raising legitimate questions about what's being done with their tax money.
Your misinformation about journals is addressed here by somebody else.
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States, /Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
I've been through that in New York City. Most of the medical school libraries in Manhattan don't allow public access. One of them offered to let me use their library for about $2,000 a year. It's a real problem.
If you actually tried to do it, rather than just looking at their web site, I think you'd find it was difficult to impossible. Unless you happened to find a small friendly library that had everything you needed.
The proprietary publishers have established an elaborate co-dependency relationship with academics. Academics depend on journal editorships and citations for promotion. Editors get many perks and prestige as a result of being an editor, but the selection of who becomes the editor is up to the publisher. Reviewers get pre-publication access to results. Yes, the reviewers are supposed to hold the information in confidence, but does pre-publication access help them in thinking about which directions to take in their own work? Absolutely. An extensive web of co-dependence has evolved between the proprietary publishers and the academic community.
Academics generally do not receive royalties from journal articles, but they do from book publications. Who publishes those books? The same publishers that publish the proprietary journals. Who selects which authors will be invited to publish books? The publishers.
Elite institutions and large university systems negotiate discounted and preferred subscription agreements giving their researchers free access to a wide range of journals, which in turn makes it more attractive for academic "stars" to go to those institutions. The faculty at those schools benefit from these favorable access agreements. Are we surprised that University of California faculty voted against open access?
It is also not just speech and language research. The majority of work in fields like cancer research is also published in paywalled journals. Cancer patients may not be able to wait a year before articles appear in open access archives.
The vast majority of academic work is supported by public funding, and charitable foundations support most of what is not government supported. High time to require open access. The academics are not going to do it themselves.
Statesman
Socializing costs, privatizing profits. That's how money is made in science (and banking and almost everything else) these days.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Under MIT's Open Campus Policy, the library he was at, and all other places on campus are open to the public.
So the argument of trespass is suspect at best.
I work in academia so I have access to most of the journals I need but not all. When I hit a paywall, I either Google for the PDF (a lot of authors chuck their papers on the web somewhere even if it's "illegal") or I e-mail the authors. Many papers are available free with a year delay. I've never, ever, had to pay at the wall to get a paper I needed. I know the scientific article situation is bad in many ways, but you don't have to wait multiple years for access: use your brain and get it some other way.
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