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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.
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.
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