Why Is Science Behind a Paywall? 210
An anonymous reader writes "The Priceonomics blog has a post that looks into how so much of our scientific knowledge came to be gated by current publishing models. 'The most famous of these providers is Elsevier. It is a behemoth. Every year it publishes 250,000 articles in 2,000 journals. Its 2012 revenues reached $2.7 billion. Its profits of over $1 billion account for 45% of the Reed Elsevier Group — its parent company which is the 495th largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization. Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers.' The article also explain how moving to open access journals would help, but says it's just one step in a more significant transformation scientific research needs to undergo. It points to the open source software community as a place from which researchers should take their cues."
Re:Because it's valuable, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
Key difference: food is not produced by non-profit farmers, who would love to give their food away for free to everyone in the world if only the grocery stores allowed it. Nor do the people who write scientific journal articles expect to earn royalties for every copy read. Scientists want their work to be read and shared *without the motive of earning a single penny per copy distributed.*
Re:Authors need to eat somehow (Score:5, Informative)
The authors and peer reviewers need to be able to afford to live or they can't write!
True as that may be -- if only the authors or peer reviewers got any of that money! But since they don't, your point is kinda irrelevant.
I have never made any money either submitting or reviewing for journals/conferences. I hear sometimes you even have to pay to get your work published (fortunately not in my field)
Re:Because it's valuable, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
Authors are paid next to nothing. I've published a paper by Springer which is currently selling for $40 for a download. Guess how much I got paid? $0 (and even had to sign a huge contract detailing the terms of my $0 compensation).
Scientists publish papers because they need credit, references, public claims on their discoveries etc. Big-name scientists may actually earn something if they negotiate it.
The only reason I see the publishers get such a huge compensation is that they have to review papers (probably hire scientists from similar fields) and deal with the incoming stream of bullshit articles.
It's even worse (Score:5, Informative)
I recently wanted to get access to a single article from a magazine for teachers because I wanted to do something different this time and the name of the article promised an interesting viewpoint.
However, my school did not subscribe to that magazine and it was an issue from 2004 to boot. So I went to Wiley's website and they offered me the option to buy a time-restricted access to that six(6)-page article. Yeah, you read that right: Shell out money and if you don't download the article as a PDF (which they offer, by the way) you lose access again. Doesn't really make sense but, hey...
Anyway, put that article into the "cart" and proceeded to the checkout. 40€. For a single article. From a magazine which costs 90€ per year if you subscribe to it as a private person (4 issues a year, 7-8 articles per issue). Where the articles are written by teachers for other teachers.
So I drove the 20 minutes to my local university after my school day had ended and photocopied the pages for 0.18€.
Screw those guys.
Re:Because it's valuable, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
Not for journal articles. For whole textbooks, a small pittance --- nothing remotely profitable compared to the thousands of hours that go into preparing such a text. The person I know who got an advanced graduate level text published through a major publisher earned ~$1 in royalties per copy, for a book that sold for $160 (and would, optimistically, sell a few thousand copies). He joined in with the lab's gray market overseas purchase (for about half the US price), because he sure as heck wasn't making any extra from the publisher's extortion. Only a few of the most common freshman introductory texts --- that will sell zillions of copies --- might be profitable; anything more advanced (that actually draws on the researcher's own particular area of expertise to advance a field) is done at a loss by the author --- typically only after getting tenure, since time spent writing a textbook isn't adding to annual publication counts.
Re:Because it's valuable, duh. (Score:4, Informative)
I think you might mean "attempts to reproduce." "Peer review" occurs before the paper is published. The author submits the paper to the journal or conference, the editor of the publication sends copies of the paper to experts in the field (generally other researchers who have already been accepted to the journal/conference), and those experts, peers of the author, review the paper and make recommendations. After reading the feedback from the reviewers, the editor may choose to reject the paper, publish the paper, or ask the author for revisions.
vanishing new journal racks in libraries (Score:5, Informative)