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Paywalls Block Scientific Progress. Research Should Be Open To Everyone (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Academic and scientific research needs to be accessible to all. The world's most pressing problems like clean water or food security deserve to have as many people as possible solving their complexities. Yet our current academic research system has no interest in harnessing our collective intelligence. Scientific progress is currently thwarted by one thing: paywalls. Paywalls, which restrict access to content without a paid subscription, represent a common practice used by academic publishers to block access to scientific research for those who have not paid. This keeps $25.5bn flowing from higher education and science into for-profit publisher bank accounts.
My recent documentary, Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, uncovered that the largest academic publisher, Elsevier, regularly has a profit margin between 35-40%, which is greater than Google's. With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages â" things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have. Furthermore, university librarians are regularly required to sign non-disclosure agreements on their contract-pricing specifics with the largest for-profit publishers. Each contract is tailored specifically to that university based upon a variety of factors: history, endowment, current enrolment. This thwarts any collective discussion around price structures, and gives publishers all the power.
My recent documentary, Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, uncovered that the largest academic publisher, Elsevier, regularly has a profit margin between 35-40%, which is greater than Google's. With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages â" things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have. Furthermore, university librarians are regularly required to sign non-disclosure agreements on their contract-pricing specifics with the largest for-profit publishers. Each contract is tailored specifically to that university based upon a variety of factors: history, endowment, current enrolment. This thwarts any collective discussion around price structures, and gives publishers all the power.
Corrupt System!
If it's behind a paywall, it's not really science. The scientific method requires peer review.
Hopefully, like The Pirate Bay and others blazing the trail before them, they can continue to fight evil and make the world a better place.
Can we not start a pressure group to push federal lawmakers into passing a law dictating that all publicly funded research automatically be made available freely with no paywalls whatsoever? Private publishing outfits can still hide their resources behind paywalls if they wish, but informed citizens will ignore them and go directly for the multiple open websites that offer the full text of such publicly funded research. Is that too much to ask?
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Anyone know whether this is a worldwide problem, or only with US published studies/sites? Because it frustrates me with places like hospitals in the US, that every link down to the vending machines has to turn an individual profit, instead of looking at it as a whole.
and they don't take kindly to being cut out.
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There are always some fuckers that want to restrict access and get rich on it. It is an utter disgrace.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Completely wrong. Researchers get zero money for publishing their research or for reviewing the research of others. It is all going to greedy and, today, mostly worthless publishers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Can we not start a pressure group to push federal lawmakers into passing a law dictating that all publicly funded research automatically be made available freely with no paywalls whatsoever?
Would it be acceptable to region-lock tax-funded publications, offering them without charge to domestic viewers but putting foreign viewers behind a paywall? Consider that, for example, a French citizen living in France likely did not contribute to research funded by U.S. tax dollars. Compare what BBC has done with iPlayer and the like.
As a reader of journals I wish there was fewer to read. If we could just charge more for publishing and/or reading then people might possibly publish less or publish things that are more informative.
So that's the counter argument to paywalls.
The problem that a lot of people see, that isn't the actual problem here. Publishing test is now close to free. So you can't say the cost of publishing is justified by the cost of materials.
Before we might have thought that was the important value in charging. But it turns out it's the deterrence and filtering effect that are worth paying for not the paper. THere is also the value of archical retention which has gotten to be a higher risk in the age of computers. Printed materials last decades to centuries whereas digital materials often can't be read after a decade. I can't say the published are assuredly doing a good job on archiving but presumably they are trying rather than depending on the whim of Wordperect, or Troff, or Microxosft word 2.0 being readable 5 years hence.
Better search engines don't help. There's almost nothing a search engine can do to distinguish a good article from a bad one. The only thing they can do is score the articles by citations or journal reputation. And a higher priced journal generally gets less crap submitted to it, hence the reputation builds.
So I have no problem with reasonable fees. I'd pay even more if we could somehow filter out more of the crap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Impose a fee on Universities and other places that harbor research staff sufficient to support a small staff of editors and the like to coordinate and distribute papers.
Good idea! Bringing on a group of full-time employees will undoubtedly be cheaper than subscriptions to publishing services. Anyway, the universities can recoup the cost by merely raising their modest tuitions a little.
The very same researchers, etc. commit to reviewing studies for free.
Another good idea! Why shouldn't university employees be happy to work for free?
Papers are submitter, the paid staff categorizes and sends out for review, reviews classify not only if they are publish worthy, but also their normal review process.
I'm having a hard time parsing that one, but I'm sure it's just as good as the others.
If the ten most prestigious universities in America put their heads together (not counting the football teams), this system of extortion could be ended almost overnight. They merely have to collectively announce that these kinds of journals will have their tenure clout progressively de-weighted in the realm of future academic promotions.
tenure_clout = institutional_ubiquity ^ (k/alpha) * traditional_clout;
institutional_ubiquity is a value between 0 and 1, which approximates the number of institutions of higher learning where faculty and students have cost-free access to the journal in question (any stable, approximate metric will do; you don't have to scour the world down to the last accredited college in Uganda or the Australian outback—though you can if the spirit moves you).
k is an integer, initialized to zero for the coming academic year, which increments annually.
alpha is a constant of moderation, probably somewhere around five. If your gated journal has ubiquity 0.5, then in five years it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5; in ten years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^2 = 0.25 = conservation status "critically endangered"; in twenty years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^4 = 6% = conservation status "zoo specimens only".
This immediately bequeaths a nail-studded bargaining club to the underfunded libraries of poorer countries, because Elsevier will be in a blind panic to keep their ubiquity scores well above 0.5 for the foreseeable future (about a decade) to milk what's left of the cow—a cow that's now thoroughly sterilized, never to breed again. Elsevier's predicament in this Brave New World: without viable tenure_clout you receive nothing of impact to publish; with nothing of impact to publish, the lemming compulsion of all these institutions to blindly pony up instantly withers on the wine.
This small problem in extirpation design is easily solved, by Bitcoin ^ (1/10), by which I mean a mere Satoshi fingernail clipping could architect the whole scheme in under ten minutes, 99% bug free, and binding for perpetuity.
That this is so translates as follows (for those of you whose Japanese is the least bit rusty): what we're really dealing with here is institutional capture, or this would have been done already, and elite America universities would not be voluntarily donating blood to Dutch pirates, as they continue to do. Maybe they don't mind paying Elsevier these giants royalties, for the same reason that Apple customers everywhere reach exactly the same conclusion: it's not so much the product you're paying for, as the exclusivity the arrangement creates. From the perspective of the Ivy League, exclusivity generally maps to a feature, not a bug.
Now you might need to choose a larger alpha for narrower specialties so as not to unduly punish academics presently in the tenure pipeline, who were not notified in advance that the rules were in aggressive flux. This is why a piracy shakeout leveraged around standards of academic promotion needs to be clairvoyantly tuned to take on the order of ten to twenty years. (Not a big deal: one Satoshi Fingernail Clawback, coming up.)
If these same universities bond together on an economic footing, it would smack of collusion, and also open the alliance up to divide and conquer (if the end game boils down to nothing more than getting the largest subscription discount, the first to move can be enticed with the largest reward).
Elsevier would have a much harder legal-grievance row to hoe sticking their beak into tenure-committee standards of merit.
I have seen the game-theoretic matrix, and it tilts heavily toward the formerly Philandric Ivy League, yet somehow Elsevier continues to run the table on pocket sevens.
But now the fix is in, as outlined above, and there's nothing remaining to do but make it so.
When I was a graduate student in 1973, scientists were already talking about a better model for publication, potentially bypassing for-profit publishers. Half a century later, we still have basically the same system. There are of course alternative journals that follow an open-access model, but many if not most laboratories can't afford to publish in them, at least not consistently. Before my retirement last year, I published my very last paper in an open-access journal, and it cost me about $3500 in open-access fees. It's very difficult to compare costs of open-access journals, which are paid by researchers, with those of paywall journals, which are paid by libraries. But I am not convinced there are any big savings to be had by switching to an open-access model.