Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I've seen, Elsevier's Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities' costs, which are being passed to their students.
Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.
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Razib Khan found this paragraph rather striking (who is reminded of this episode of South Park) and I would tend to agree that its a rather convincing argument.
Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose
Are publishers really so successful as rent seekers or is there something the original article is missing here? Also what useful strategies would LWers recommend to help minimize costs for someone trying to practice the virtue of scholarship? The obvious suggestions (implied in the article) seem to be emailing authors (and perhaps those suscribed) asking for the papers and acquiring and paying for membership in some libraries.
Another obvious option is using ... liberated databases of such academic papers.
Edit: Just wondering, has this been discussed before on Lesswrong?
Publishing in certain journals (and conferences) is high-reputation, because everyone in some field or subfield believes they are. And thus, they all try to submit their papers to that journal, and thus that journal gets to pick the best papers, and thus that journal keeps a high reputation. Publishing work elsewhere is considered a lesser achievement, and work elsewhere is read with less regard. So, the reputation of high-status journals is notably stable.
On the other hand, almost every researcher in CS flaunts copyright, posting their papers on their own websites. The practice is so pervasive that when I want to find a specific paper, I usually search for the author's website first, before I try accessing the journal -- even thouggh I have the expensive university access to those journals. (Well, in CS they're usually conference proceedings instead of journals, but that's beside the point.)
In fact, author home pages are a vastly better mechanism for finding research than journals or conference proceedings are, because they can carry far more information. Authors will often have more up-to-date versions of their research than the journal version does. Sometimes they have code or interactive demos. Often they put their later, related work in the same place, which is oftern clearer or more useful.
Other fields could make this shift too, subfield by subfield and journal audience by journal audience. For this to happen cleanly, a significant fraction of the top researchers in a field need to get together and agree to break copyright in the same way. In any given subfield, they probably already go to the same conferences, so there's plenty of opportunity to reach these agreements. One or two doing this alone would be prone to lawsuits from the publisher, but all at once would destroy their audience.
This may be a daunting risk for many academics, though, and it probably seems needlessly risky. And it is needlessly risky. It seems like it should be much easier to get that same roomful of academics to agree to move their shared regard from a closed-access journal to an open-access journal. Moreso, because there are already people building free journal-management software for exactly this purpose, this should be relatively easy to do.
Moving individual fields and subfields to totally-free, totally-open journals is, now, just a matter of memtic engineering. Convince enough people in any given field to switch, and make it easy for them to do so, and organize a little bit, and that switch can happen.
Academics, consider: what's the global value of opening the journals of your specialty? Are you, or anyone you can speak to, in a position to do this?
Everyone else: is anyone good at memetic engineering, and willing to take this as a challenge?
Many journals explicitly allow you to distribute a "preprint" of your journal articles on your personal website. For example, the Elsevier policy states that authors retain: