Joe-Ceph;179756 said:If my assessment is correct, it's clear that the journals provide an utterly necessary service, but the opportunity for corruption and profiteering is kept in check only by the existential need for the journals to maintain their reputations. I'd like to see a better system, but I can't think of one.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th August 2011
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like 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(1). Springer charges Eur34.95(2), Wiley-Blackwell, $42(3). Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50(4).
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(5). 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(6). Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets(7), 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 £2 billion)(8). 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(9).
More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can’t publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.
The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer’s words) because they “develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionized scientific communication in the past 15 years.”(10) But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. “We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”(11) Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more(12).
What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.
It’s bad enough for academics, it’s worse for the laity. I refer readers to peer-reviewed papers, on the principle that claims should be followed to their sources. The readers tell me that they can’t afford to judge for themselves whether or not I have represented the research fairly. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands(12). This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that “everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”(13)
Open-access publishing, despite its promise, and some excellent resources such as the Public Library of Science and the physics database arxiv.org, has failed to displace the monopolists. In 1998 the Economist, surveying the opportunities offered by electronic publishing, predicted that “the days of 40% profit margins may soon be as dead as Robert Maxwell.”(14) But in 2010 Elsevier’s operating profit margins were the same (36%) as they were in 1998(15).
The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones.
Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17). But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on “the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies.”(18) You bet they will.
In the short-term, 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(19). In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating, along the lines proposed by Bjorn Brembs, a single global archive of academic literature and data(20). Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.
The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the Corn Laws. Let’s throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research which belongs to us.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. I sampled costs in these Elsevier journals: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology; Radiation Physics and Chemistry and Crop Protection, all of which charge US$31.50. Papers in a fourth publication I checked, the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, cost US$35.95.
2. I sampled costs in these Springer journals: Journal of Applied Spectroscopy, Kinematics and Physics of Celestial Bodies and Ecotoxicology, all of which charge Eur34.95.
3. I sampled costs in these Wiley-Blackwell journals: Plant Biology; Respirology and Journal of Applied Social Psychology, all of which charge US$ 42.00.
4. I went into the archive of Elsevier’s Applied Catalysis, and checked the costs of the material published in its first issue: April 1981.
5. Bjorn Brembs, 2011. What’s Wrong with Scholarly Publishing Today? II. What's wrong with scholarly publishing today? II
6. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/506062/bibliographic
7. The Economist, 26th May 2011. Of goats and headaches. Of goats and headaches
8. The Economist, as above.
9. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, 2008. The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, volume 9, number 3.
The Business of Academic Publishing
10. Springer Corporate Communications, 29th August 2011. By email. I spoke to Elsevier and asked them for a comment, but I have not received one.
11. Deutsche Bank AG, 11th January 2005. Reed Elsevier: Moving the Supertanker. Global Equity Research Report. Quoted by Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.
12. John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, March 2009. But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access. Economic Analysis & Policy, Vol. 39, No. 1. www.eap-journal.com/download.php?file=692
13. Article 27. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a27
14. The Economist, 22nd January 1998. Publishing, perishing, and peer review. Publishing, perishing, and peer review
15. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.
16. See Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.
17. When and How to Comply | Public Access
18. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/2006statement.pdf
19. Danny Kingsley shows how a small change could make a big difference: “Currently all universities collect information about, and a copy of, every research article written by their academics each year. … But the version of the papers collected is the Publisher’s PDF. And in most cases this is the version we cannot make open access through digital repositories. … the infrastructure is there and the processes are already in place. But there is one small change that has to happen before we can enjoy substantive access to Australian research. The Government must specify that they require the Accepted Version (the final peer reviewed, corrected version) of the papers rather than the Publisher’s PDF for reporting.”
http://theconversation.edu.au/how-one-small-fix-could-open-access-to-research-2637
20. Bjorn Brembs, as above.
I might not be an author
September 12, 2011
by seth godin
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The Author’s Guild is suing the University of Michigan and other college libraries because of their selfish, heinous plan to digitize and freely share old books for which authors cannot be found.
The Author’s Guild, which does not speak for me, nor for any author I know or possibly have ever met, says that this plan could lead to a “potentially catastrophic, widespread dissemination” of books.
Catastrophic?
It’s catastrophic to share dusty books for which the author cannot be found? Why?
Either books are a cultural treasure, part of our heritage and discourse and worthy of discussion, or they are merely a way to make a living. If being an author means that you view the distribution of your work (after you’re so far gone as to be unfindable) as catastrophic, I’m probably not an author.
Count me out.
D. J. Bernstein
Notes on writing papers
Don't publish with IEEE!
Before you read this page, you should understand (1) authors putting papers online to benefit readers, (2) commercial publishers using copyright to limit #1, and (3) authors dedicating papers to the public domain as one way to stop #2. I have a separate page discussing these issues.
It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.
I learned about this from a UIC graduate student who had submitted a paper to a conference whose proceedings were to be published by IEEE. After the paper was accepted, IEEE notified the student that a copyright transfer was required. The student declared his intention to put his paper into the public domain. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager threatened the student with non-publication of the paper. Faced with this pressure, the student capitulated and, rather than eliminating the copyright, transferred it to IEEE.
When I heard about this incident, I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager to explain his overall assertion that IEEE refuses to publish public-domain papers:
Works from government authors are in the public domain, and I find it difficult to believe that IEEE refuses papers from government authors. I see that the IEEE Copyright Form has a special section for government authors.
How many public-domain papers does IEEE actually publish? Surely you have the exact figures for each year. Is it fair to say that, in fact, IEEE publishes many public-domain papers?
The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to answer these questions.
In his messages to the student, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had asserted that ``IEEE needs to be the owner of the work ... by assignment.'' Obviously this is impossible for papers in the public domain: copyright assignment isn't possible when the copyright no longer exists. I looked at the IEEE Copyright Policies and found that public-domain papers were clearly exempted from the copyright-transfer requirement:
Such transfer shall be a necessary requirement for publication, EXCEPT for material in the public domain.
(Emphasis added.) I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager to explain the contradiction between his statements and the IEEE Copyright Policies. His only response was the rather idiotic comment that ``IEEE policy requires authors to submit an IEEE Copyright Form in order for publication to occur''; needless to say, the IEEE Copyright Form is written by the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office.
In his messages to the student, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had explained IEEE's alleged need for being ``the owner of the work'' as follows: ``We can put it into the Xplore database and license it to others as one of our ongoing electronic distribution of IEEE publications.'' I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager for clarification:
When there is no copyright, IEEE is completely free to do these things. It can distribute the work as widely as it wants, and it can authorize others to do so. All IEEE gets out of a copyright is the power to _stop_ the distribution of the information.
If the public domain is a problem for IEEE, how does IEEE publish works from government authors? Do you have a better explanation for your desire to be the owner of the work? Is it fair to say that IEEE actually _does_ want to stop the distribution of scientific information?
Naturally, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to respond.
The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had also devoted some effort to trying to fool the student into believing that papers could not simply be dedicated to the public domain. I asked for clarification:
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has commented that ``It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act may be abandoned.'' The standard way to abandon copyright is by a clear written dedication of the work to the public domain. One example of a public-domain dedication is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain; surely you're aware of attorney Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons effort.
You stated that ``there is a specific legal process for placing your work in the PD.'' When the student asked you for details, you refused to answer. Instead you said that you were ``dubious about the idea of simply declaring one's intention to inject a work into the public domain,'' and that IEEE needed to be able to ``prove'' its rights.
If IEEE has trouble ``proving'' its rights to publish a public-domain paper, then how does IEEE ``prove'' alleged authorship of a paper whose copyright is allegedly transferred, and how does IEEE ``prove'' an allegation of government employment? Is the ``legal process'' you mentioned something more than making a clear written dedication of the work to the public domain? If so, what exactly is the process? Why didn't you answer the student's question regarding this process? Is it fair to say that the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office is trying to intimidate authors into transferring copyright to IEEE?
The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to respond.
The bottom line is that IEEE is refusing to accept public-domain papers except from government authors. IEEE has no justification for this position. IEEE's action is a blatant attempt to maintain control over papers that would otherwise have been freely available to the public. Unfortunately, at least in this student's case, the attempt succeeded: a paper that was accepted by IEEE's scientific referees, and that would have been in the public domain without IEEE's pressure, is now part of IEEE's copyright portfolio.
Consequently, I am blacklisting IEEE here. I recommend that authors find another publisher. Springer, for example, tacitly (although quite unhappily) allows public-domain papers, and AMS explicitly does not require a copyright transfer.
Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly…
Princeton Princeton University hopes its new Open Access policy will pressure academic publishers to stop requiring the copyright to the papers they publish. Flickr/Yakinodi
Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.
The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.
Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.
Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.
At a September 19 meeting, Princeton’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the “nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles.”
“The University authorizes professors to post copies of their articles on their own web sites or on University web sites, or in other not-for-a-fee venues,” the policy said.
“The main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal.”
Under the policy, academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”
In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University.
The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”
Academics will also be encouraged to place their work in open access data stores such as Arxiv or campus-run data repositories.
Princeton University spokesman, Martin A. Mbugua, said the policy was not an outright ban on staff handing copyright to journal publishers.
“It is a new open access policy that gives our faculty an advantage, and the option of seeking a waiver,” he said.
A step forward
Having prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard fly the open access flag represented a step forward, said open access advocate Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education.
“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions,” he said.
“Essentially, this approach – if it becomes general – normalises an open access regime and offers authors the option of opting out of that regime. This is a large improvement on the present position whereby copyright restrictions and price barriers are normal and authors have to attempt to opt in to open access publishing, or risk prosecution by posting their work in breach of copyright.”
“The only interests that lose out under the Princeton proposal are the big journal publishers. Everyone else gains.”
Professor Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Technology, Information and Learning Support at the Queensland University of Technology, who has also led an Open Access policy mandate at QUT welcomed Princeton’s new rule but warned that the waiver must not be used too regularly, lest the policy be undermined.
If all universities and research institutions globally had policies similar to Princeton’s, the ultimate owner of published academic work would be universities and their research communities collectively, Professor Cochrane said.
“They are the source of all the content that publishers absolutely require to run their business model,” he said.
Dr Danny Kingsley, an open access expert and Manager of Scholarly Communication and ePublishing at Australian National University said the move was a positive step and that the push for open access should come from the academic community.
In practice, however, the new policy requires staff have a good understanding of the copyright arrangements they currently have with journal publishers in their field.
They will need to ensure future publisher’s agreements accommodate the new position and if not, obtain a waiver from the University.
“This sounds easy but in reality might be a challenge for some academics. There is considerable evidence to show that academics often have very little understanding of the copyright situation of their published work,” she said.
“What will be most telling will be the publishers' response over the next year or so. If they start providing amended agreements to Princeton academics then the door will be open for other universities to follow this lead. I suspect however they will not, as generally the trend seems for publishers to make the open access path a complex and difficult one.”
Academia.edu, a social network for researchers, is having a good year. In 2011 it’s tripled its total registered userbase to 800,000, and today it’s announcing some major news that ensures the site will be expanding well into the future: it’s just raised $4.5 million in a funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from True Ventures. This is the company’s second round of funding, after a $2.2 million round in late 2009 (the investors from that round participated in this one as well).
Academia.edu can be thought of as a social network for academics, in that it allows them to forge connections and follow updates around their field, but it has another benefit: it gives them a powerful, efficient way to distribute their research. Unlike, say, a personal website, which probably won’t have much in the way of analytics or search engine optimization, Academia.edu will let researchers keep tabs on how many people are reading their articles with specialized analytics tools, and it also does very well in Google search results. Academics are uploading 2,500 articles to the site each day, and, as a result, the site is now drawing some 3 million unique visitors, many of whom are arriving at the site’s articles via Google.
Founder Richard Price (whose Academia profile you can check out here) says that aside from getting an increasing amount of traction with researchers, the site is also benefitting from a recent movement among universities and researchers that’s referred to as ‘Open Science‘. If you’ve ever tried looking up scholarly papers online, you’ve likely encountered one of the many paywalls put up by the journals those papers were published in. Access to these papers can be very expensive, depending on the journal — in some cases prohibitively so. In short, the information is fragmented and doesn’t flow freely.
Recently some scientists have begun to combat this by deeming their papers ‘open access’, thereby making them publicly accessible for free. Princeton now requires researchers to get a waiver if they want to assign all copyright to a journal; MIT and Harvard have both enacted open access policies as well. Many researchers believe that this open access will help streamline the research itself, allowing for faster innovation.
Academia.edu benefits from this movement because it means that researchers are free to share papers amongst themselves on the site. Price says that Academia.edu is already the largest platform for sharing these research articles, and the company looks to help foster this trend going forward.
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research. Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.