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Science Journals Are Laughing All the Way To the Bank, Locking the Results of Publicly Funded Research Behind Exorbitant Paywalls. This Must Be Stopped. (newscientist.com)
Here is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. New Scientist: The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers. To rub salt into the wound they then sell it via exorbitant subscriptions and paywalls, often paid for by taxpayers too.
The academic publishing business model is indefensible. Practically everybody -- even the companies that profit from it -- acknowledges that it has to change. And yet the status quo has proven extremely resilient. The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available. When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum. Plan S deserves a chance.
The academic publishing business model is indefensible. Practically everybody -- even the companies that profit from it -- acknowledges that it has to change. And yet the status quo has proven extremely resilient. The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available. When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum. Plan S deserves a chance.
Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to patent publicly funded research. Universities draw lots of money from the indirect (facilities and administrative; F&A) costs that are included in grants. It's often a bit over 50% of the modified total direct costs for a grant. For a grant with $200,000 of direct costs, the university might add on $100,000 in F&A costs. They don't need the patents, and it often doesn't even bring in a lot of money for universities to do so. Instead, require that data and software generated by the project be publicly available, either under an open source license or in the public domain. My institution lets me own the copyrights to the software I create for my research, so I've started releasing it under the GPL. It would allow for easy reproducibility and I don't think it would really harm universities.
This is a good idea, but needs to be used with caution. The push toward open access publishing has led to the creation of predatory open access journals. These are journals that charge publication fees of the authors and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so. I've personally received a number of emails asking me to be an editor for such journals. The journals pretend to conduct peer review, but either it's a complete joke or manuscripts aren't sent out at all. I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory. I support open access publishing, but there also needs to be standards that require legitimate peer review to occur.
Academic publishers have every right to protect their intellectual property and charge for access.
By "intellectual property", do you refer to patents, trademarks, or trade secrets in addition to copyrights? If so, which? The appropriate policy reasoning is likely to depend on the significant differences among these areas of law. If not, why use the term "intellectual property" instead of "copyright" which is both shorter and more precise?
And why haven't we seen a price war among journals to attract subscribers from other journals?
I've seen the skew that can occur for scientific research, both for physically testable results and for socially interpreted data. In at least some cases where results were replicated and failed, there was a subtle distinction in the experimental setup that skewed the results. I've personally exposed such a situation, where the equipment was not used consistently due to availability. When I reviewed the data, I found that the correlation being reported had almost nothing to do with what they thought they were measuring, and was overwhelmed by the status of the measurement equipment. I was also _blessed_ that my supervisor recorded _everything_, and the original data had not been pruned of "irrelevant" information.
The same occurs in the software world: casual speed tests of small samples of data. Data that is often selected for optimum qualities, do not scale up reliably. It's especially true for personal skunkworks projects that deal with none of the exceptional cases.