Slashdot Mirror
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.
If all of the public research was public, then we'd all be able to see how much of it is a sham.
This is of course a great reason to mandate that all publicly funded research be made completely free to access. For-Pay journals could well survive just by curating the most interesting an accurate of them, and it's likely the quality of journals would go up as a result.
Building back up the credibility of science in general is a huge need at present, because the lack of it is allowing things like anti-vac sentiment and other crazy ideas to spread like wildfire.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No government money is going to middlemen who offer nothing of value.
It's basically hijacking taxpayer content at this this point and reselling something they got for free.
If it's publicly funded it should be accessible to the public.
As a computational biologists in europe, i see a notable change in granting bodies that require open access publications. We have to put this in writing when we apply for grants. This happens on both national and EU level, so my experience is quite different than tfa.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
You're wrong. The post you're replying to is mostly correct.
As an author, I have to pay for page charges when a manuscript I submitted gets accepted for publication. Saying the publishers get the content for free isn't quite an accurate picture because the author has to actually pay the publisher.
The content is potentially being locked away, because authors generally have to sign over their copyrights in the process. In the journals I've published in, authors retain limited rights, such as being allowed to use figures in funding proposals. However, there are significant restrictions, so the content is, in effect, being locked away.
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?
Considering the fact that the writers are using my tax money to create that property, shouldn't I get some stock/compensation for said property?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Never forget what these people did to Aaron Swartz.
They have killed to protect their business model.
Never doubt they'll do it again.
[End Of Line]
Say a particular article is the result of research funded by a particular country. Would it be acceptable if access to that article without charge were region locked to its sponsor country, where one would need to log in with a taxpayer ID and password to view it?
The push toward open access publishing has led to the creation of [...] journals that charge publication fees of the authors
So far, you've described a vanity press.
and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so.
Here's an exercise: Define what is and isn't adequate peer review.
I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory.
Once you have somewhat rigorously defined peer review, you can collect and present evidence that a particular publication acts as a vanity press. This evidence should make a defense in a defamation suit practical.
This is where most of the journals came from. They were originally the newsletters of scientific societies which were effectively formed from letters that members would write in with when they had results to share. Hence the reason many have "letters" in the name.
As the number of letters grew it became too much effort and expense for these societies to publish all of them given the technology of the day and so they sold them off to professional publishers who organized the peer review, editing and publishing and then charged a fee to cover their costs and make a profit.
Today technology has now caught up and publishing costs and effort have both been enormously reduced to the point where a professional publisher is no longer required. What we need to see happen is journals returning to being run by professional science societies. If you make membership in the society a requirement to publish in their journals and make the journals available for free then I expect this would easily drive up income from membership dues enough to cover the modest costs of organizing peer review, editing and electronic publishing. It would also avoid the "pay-to-publish" model that causes a conflict of interest: you have to be a member to submit regardless of whether it is accepted and the cost of membership is usually rather modest so even non-professional scientists can afford it.
Reviewers and editors often don't get paid for their work. It's considered a synergistic activity and is often viewed favorably when applying for grants. The real costs are copy editors, printing costs, and maintaining servers. Arguably, printing costs should be covered by subscribers rather than contributors. I'd like to see restrictions on public funding used to pay for publication in for-profit journals, especially predatory open access journals and publishers with paywalls.
In my field of meteorology, some of the most impactful journals are operated by professional societies like the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and this is how other fields should work as well. I don't like AMS putting papers behind paywalls and charging high prices unless an open access fee is paid, though at least it's only behind the paywall for something like three years. While AMS could be better, it's a very viable alternative to publishers that bury articles behind expensive paywalls in perpetuity. Funding agencies should encourage and insist that results be published in these types of journals.
Same here: most journals originated with our international scientific associations, but got into the hands of international publishers because of the difficulty of publishing and distributing when most of this happened. Impactful journals are generally relatively old as it takes time to build a reputation, so most were established before online publishing and open access were things.
Most of the real work is indeed done without cost to the journal: researching, writing, reviewing, deciding, (substance) editing. The remainder (copy-editing, type setting, indexing/archiving) is indeed done by the journal/publisher, and these costs need to be recouped somehow.
Example: I'm in the process of starting a community-owned open access journal. Renting a server and installing OJS (open journal systems, an FOSS submission management system) is probably around 100$ per year. Our publisher (a university press) does the type setting and indexing/archiving for us for 250$ per article, which is their cost (they don't make a profit). Of course that also pays for a bit of overhead on their side.
So, we can either charge and APC of 250$ per article (which is one tenth of what some commercial journals ask), but we are currently trying to get sponsored by academic institutions: if each chips in 1000$ per year, we quickly have enough funding to allow us to waive the APC (which will help attract submissions, especially while we are still building our reputation / need to get indexed etc).