Academic Publishers Make Murdoch Look Like A Socialist

[HuckleB]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

"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.

..."


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A worthy read, IMO. This was followed up by Ben Goldacre:

Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/bad-science-academic-publishing

"This week George Monbiot won the internet with a Guardian piece on academic publishers. For those who didn't know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations that charge around $30 (£18.50) per paper, keeping out any reader who doesn't have access through their institution.

This is a barrier to the public understanding of science and to ongoing scholarship by people who've wandered away from institutional academia. There are open-access alternatives, where academics pay up-front and the paper is free to all, but these are patchy, and require your funder to pay £1,000 per paper. If the journal your work best suits doesn't do open access, you might reasonably accept a closed-access journal.

The arguments are big. What I find interesting is the recent rise of direct action on this issue. Aaron Swartz is a fellow at Harvard's Centre for Ethics, and a digital activist. He has been accused of intellectual property theft on a grand scale. What follows is the prosecutors' account of events, taken from the indictment, which is available online. It's not clear how much – if any – is accepted by Swartz, but it describes an inspiringly nerdy game of cat and mouse.

They allege that he bought a laptop to harvest academic papers from the website JSTOR. Using a guest login at MIT – they last 14 days – he set a program running to download papers in bulk. JSTOR and MIT smelt a rat: they blocked access to whole ranges of computers in MIT, creating havoc. Swartz set two computers on the job, running so fast several JSTOR servers stopped working.

..."

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This is definitely something that needs to be addressed. I have no great answers, myself, however.

[RZM]

1. And that's just the journals. Then there's the hardbacks.

You're looking at $90 or more for some of the monographs - going into the hundreds for edited volumes with multiple authors. All that pretty much guarantees the only customers for those are going to be libraries.

[HuckleB]

2. Indeed.

[HuckleB]

3. .

:kick: