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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Scientist meets Publisher « Previous | |Next »
February 15, 2012

Alex Holcombe says that academic publishing is stuck in an outmoded system. Most scientific research is paid for by government and non-profit university funds, but high-profit corporate publishers often control access to the results of the research through their paywalls. It's a knowledge monopoly.

It’s not just authors that provide free labor to the publishers. It’s also the academics that review each of the articles. Holcombe says:

The largely for-profit publishing system particularly galls because we scientists do most of the work, but the publishers make all the money. For most journals, scientists not only write all the manuscripts submitted to them, but also vet and edit all these manuscripts before they are published – the peer-review process – all without receiving a cent for their services.

Those not associated with a subscribing university or research institution pay a huge fee for each article --up up to A$42 an article---they download. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

This restricts the flow of new knowledge. One solution is to opening up access to scholarship eg., the Open Humanities Press. This is spelled out by Michael B. Eisen in the New York Times:

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication.

Unlimited access to the latest publicly funded scientific and medical findings is an important public good. So governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:49 AM |