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?

Comments

One possible solution...

[Dutch Gun]

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.