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Education Science

Paywalls Block Scientific Progress. Research Should Be Open To Everyone (theguardian.com) 97

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.

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Paywalls Block Scientific Progress. Research Should Be Open To Everyone

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  • by no-body ( 127863 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:15PM (#58354842)
    Corrupt System!
    • 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?). A huge part (most) of the world's science is currently funded by government with the profits privatized.
      • Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:31PM (#58354916)

        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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

        • Re:Two words (Score:4, Insightful)

          by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:58PM (#58355036) Homepage Journal

          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.

    • 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.

      The very same researchers, etc. commit to reviewing studies 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.

      • by tsqr ( 808554 )

        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.

      • 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.

        The very same researchers, etc. commit to reviewing studies 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.

        All the people involved in writing, reviewing, editing, & most of the publishing process are researchers themselves & do it for the prestige &/or to contribute to the scientific community. The don't get paid anything extra for doing this extra work. Nowadays, academic publishers are glorified shopping cart software providers & little else.

  • It's not science. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:22PM (#58354862) Homepage

    If it's behind a paywall, it's not really science. The scientific method requires peer review.

    • If it's behind a paywall, it's not really science. The scientific method requires peer review.

      Er, peer-reviewed articles can be and often are behind paywalls.

      • If your global peers around the world don't have access, that's not peer review, that's getting a select few pumpers to trumpet your work while avoiding any kind of significant and broad peer review process.

        That's not science. Sorry, dude.

        • You have redefined "peer review" to suit yourself. Getting a few selected "peers" to evaluate and critique the paper is exactly what peer review is. You don't get to make up your own definitions for existing words.

    • 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 tu

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      If it's behind a paywall, it's not really science. The scientific method requires peer review.

      Missed lecture three of Classics 101, did you? Many people did. As I recall, there was some kind of shooting incidence on campus that morning; only a few eggheads tuned out the drama and showed up for class.

      A peerage is a legal system historically comprising hereditary titles in various countries, comprising various noble ranks.

      Bottom line: If they're not behind the right peerage wall, they're not your peers.

      • If you are operating behind some medieval concept of limited peerage, you are not a scientist, you are a keeper of knowledge. More akin to a medieval hedge wizard than a modern scientist.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    for the rescue!

  • Long live Sci Hub (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:28PM (#58354904)

    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.

  • by resistant ( 221968 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:30PM (#58354908) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • by UltraOne ( 79272 )
      A limited version of this is already in effect, as articles that arise from research supported by many (possibly all) US federal government grants must be available on a public access site with 12 months of the official date of publication (links to NIH [nih.gov] and NSF [nsf.gov] policies). Lobbying by publishers blocked an effort for no or a shorter waiting period.
      • In many cases, you can create a free account, then bookmark the summary or a search for the DOI on PubMed [nih.gov] and just wait until the full article is also available on there for free.

    • Region locking (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      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.

  • 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.
    • by UltraOne ( 79272 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:44PM (#58354974) Homepage
      The situation is the same with European scientific journals. Elsevier is a Dutch company. I don't know about non-English language journals, but with the possible exception of Chinese journals (which I know very little about), those are much smaller and much less prestigious than English language journals.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:35PM (#58354936)
    and they don't take kindly to being cut out.
  • Whether it's NASA or SpaceX there's a helluva lot of useful research on rockets that is never going to find its way into a whitepaper. Academia and open research have its place but those throwing out hyperbole like "all research should be free for the good of mankind" is off on a RMS-like crusade against proprietary research. Managing some kind of curated scientific journal is a lot of work that requires money, it's not just putting up arXiv and have everyone have a go at publishing their junk. If you want

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:46PM (#58354980)

    There are always some fuckers that want to restrict access and get rich on it. It is an utter disgrace.

  • Gee, msmash, thanks for the slashvertisement.

  • No problems in this world remaining are answered now by heaving around objects, none whatsoever, without an idea to precede that, to say how it answers that particular (previously unsolved) problem. Paywalls are gross and on fire and serve only to perpetuate whatever could have been solved faster with more minds on it. Whilst cancer is an issue, paywalls cause cancer, contributing to the system causes (a much tinier amount) of cancer - no hyperbole. Bulldozing all paywalls would save x amount of lives per s
  • Most papers I have seen are difficult to replicate. And even if you were able to do so, there are patents. So paywall may be one of the issues but not the only one.
  • by epine ( 68316 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @06:23PM (#58355514)

    With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages — things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have.

    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.

  • by lfp98 ( 740073 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:16PM (#58355872)
    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.
    • You may yet see it. Hardly anyone appreciates the full enormity of the Internet. On a list of the most significant advances in the past millennium, the Gutenberg Press was rated #1. Printing really cut down the cost of copying and preserving knowledge, and reduced errors. I think the Internet may prove to be even more significant. Before the Internet there was still much cost in data transmission and storage. Printed material had to be delivered somehow. And now, delivery costs are microscopic.

      I wou

  • Open Access to scientific research is important for a multitude of reasons. For example, education professionals around the world are currently rallying to make their work more (scientific) evidence-informed. The trouble is, they aren't affiliated with universities or other institutions that can provide them with access to the research that is held behind paywalls. Another example is journalists & science writers: We need public access to public research so that a multitude of people can do their jobs m

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