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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.
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.
You can have: 1-A user pay for profit system (excludes the poor, divert research funds to profit), 2-a user pay co-op system(pay what you can is "unfair" and hard to organize), or 3-a taxpayer funded and run one (ick more taxes why do I need to pay for this?).
Or you could, you know, use a website, which costs almost nothing.
The Physics community has been using ArXiv since 1991. There is no good reason that other fields can't do the same.
A huge part (most) of the world's science is currently funded by government
That is paying for the research, not publication.
If the research is funded by tax money, the publication also ought to be funded by tax money for consistency.
Of course. But that is not the way it currently works.
There are efforts to change this: Fair Acess to Science and Technology Research Act
Let your congressperson know that this bill is something important to you. My congressperson, Zoe Lofgren, is one of the co-sponsors.
All publicly funded science should be available to the public.