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.

Comments

The real reason it's locked away

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:The real reason it's locked away

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real reason it's locked away

[Antique Geekmeister]

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.

Re:The real reason it's locked away

[serviscope_minor]

If all of the public research was public, then we'd all be able to see how much of it is a sham.

Huh?

We already know. It's been reported on repeatedly. And for anyone interested in looking, many papers are available freely online even with paywalled journals and, frankly, most people aren't going to check because until you know the jargon of the field even a sound paper is indistinguishable from gibberish half the time.

This is of course a great reason to mandate that all publicly funded research be made completely free to access.

No. The reason to mandate it is so people have access to the research. Not so that people can see what a sham science is (clutches pearls). Science is the only way of knowing we actually have. That doesn't make it magically immune from Sturgeon's law. Anyone who is surpised by that is naive.

And yet science advances.

For-Pay journals could well survive just by curating the most interesting

That's what the top journals already do. Not all journals are equal.

an accurate of them,

Well, interesting is not the same as accurate *cough*nature*cough*.

and it's likely the quality of journals would go up as a result.

Doubtful. The top journals will continue to have the flashiest results. Given that most journals let authors pup papers up on their own website and allow preprints on arvix/bioarxiv (apparently biologists are too snooty to use something dirtied by pyhsicists), there won't be much difference.

Not really. Science doesn't have a credibility problem, at least not among people who will ever not see it as having a credibility problem. Those people can't be reached anyway so there's little point in trying.

because the lack of it is allowing things like anti-vac sentiment and other crazy ideas to spread like wildfire.

Humans will always be irrational. Fixing the journals won't make humans less rational. You might as well argue that science has a cedibility problem because flat-earthers exist.

Make it public

[AndyKron]

If it's publicly funded it should be accessible to the public.

Re: Make it public

[Anonymous Coward]

If it isn't, it is a moral imperative that you free the information.

Many scientists agree with you. Possibly even most.

Not my experience

[Ubi_NL]

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.

Re:Not my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Intellectual Property

[tepples]

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?

Re:Intellectual Property

[lucasnate1]

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?

These People Will Kill To Protect Their Business

[IonOtter]

Never forget what these people did to Aaron Swartz.

They have killed to protect their business model.

Never doubt they'll do it again.