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Paywalled Science Journals Under Fire Again
The Real Dr John sends this report from The Guardian:
Emeritus professor Stephen Leeder was sacked by the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) in April after challenging a decision to outsource some of the journal's functions to the world's biggest scientific publisher, Elsevier. This month he will address a symposium at the State Library of NSW where academics will discuss how to fight what they describe as the commodification of knowledge. Alex Holcombe, an associate professor of psychology who will also be presenting at the symposium, said the business model of some of the major academic publishers was more profitable than owning a gold mine. Some of the 1,600 titles published by Elsevier charged institutions more than $19,000 for an annual subscription to just one journal. The Springer group, which publishes more than 2,000 titles, charges more than $21,000 for access to some of its titles. "The mining giant Rio Tinto has a profit margin of about 23%," Holcombe said. "Elsevier consistently comes in at around 37%. Open access publishing is catching on, but it requires researchers to pay up to $3000 to get a single open access article published. What other options are there for making scientific publications available to everyone?
Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc. So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're an independent researcher then you can't afford to retain the services of more experts than just yourself, so you'll need their publishing services.
Not only that, but a journal that frequently publishes whitepapers that have withstood scrutiny tend to attract more readers, so if you publish your material, somebody is more likely to take it seriously than if they just found your blog somewhere on wordpress.
Some of these journals however don't stick to these higher standards, and will just publish anything. These sham journals are basically just a scam some unscrupulous people run (similar to say, a spammer, a snake oil salesman) for nothing more than to just make a quick buck, and aren't inclusive of the group of journals I'm referring to.
The problem in all of this is that most of these researchers are working on a skeleton budget as it is, and it's a bit of a shame that more of that money can't go directly to them. IMO this has all of the hallmarks of a market ripe for disruption; the question is who can come up with a good business model that meets all of the above needs.
We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story. Why else could you justify using public funds otherwise? I see no reason to fund research that private corporations can charge arbitrary amounts of money to simply access.
The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.
If you need to, set aside some of the grant money for some quality peer review. I'm not ignorant enough to believe that you can do everything for free, but let's make effective use of that grant money and make sure the published results are open and accessible for everyone. Hosting the data costs nothing nowadays. This is a racket that should be broken.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
These journals do not review the papers. Other scientists review the papers for free. These journals just publish them and scientific community does all the work.
There are other forces pushing small increments instead of big important papers. One is that you can publish earlier so that others do not independently discover the same thing and beat you to it. Other is that research funding is mostly about quantity, not about quality.