This post is a rant. One that may get into trouble, given what they did to Aaron Swartz. But something I feel strongly about and would like to be recorded nonetheless.
This is about one of the biggest scams in the scientific world. One, which scientists are absolutely happy participating. And most are in fact proud of it. I am talking about the whole scientific publishing industry. To those who are unaware, most of this is industry is run by scientists who volunteer their time to edit and review scientific work, so that companies which eventually publish these works can make money. The initial purpose of charging money for viewing scientific literature was to cover the cost of actual publication. But with the advent of the internet it basically has become nothing more than an excuse to make money.
I may be a bleeding leftist who might believe that we could form a perfect socialist utopia but even I understand that in a pragmatic world making money is a great thing. But the way these scientific publishers try to cheat their customers gets to my nerve. And the fact that the people who are the avant grade of science are happy to let the publishers do this to the rest of their community is even more saddening. I say rest of their community because the avant grade sits cozily in their universities where they are able to get unlimited access to scientific literature thanks mostly to the public who funds their universities or research institutions.
Compare the scientific publishers to traditional publishers of news. These publishers have considerably higher costs as all the content they publish is either produced by them or purchased by them from news agencies. No one volunteers their time to edit the content in these publications. Yet, with the advent of the internet, these companies did not carry forward their models of subscription based access. A few do have pay-walls but even those publications allow a certain number of free articles before asking you to pay up. And when they ask you to pay, a publication like the New York Times will charge you $10 a month. Scientific publishers charge $40 for access to one article. A pdf file that occupies practically no space on their servers. One might argue that the advertisement revenue for traditional publishers is quite substantial. But the cost of scientific publishing in comparison is so small, that the need for charging such ridiculous amounts completely defies logic. I wouldn't be quite as angered if these publishers were not so greedy.
The mushrooming of several open access journals is a good thing. But, the struggles some of these journal have to undergo to attain legitimacy is also quite interesting to observe. I have heard even graduate students dismissing the work published in some mid-quality open access journals as nothing more than poor quality work that one pays to get published by an unknown publisher while not making any openly negative comments about traditional journals of the same quality.
I feel it reflects quite poorly on us a scientific community that free access to knowledge is considered to be worse than writing your work off to a third party so that he can make money just so that your ego is boosted momentarily.
Till this status quo exists I will happily download and provide copies of articles that my friends request.
P.S: I don't condone piracy in other industries. For example if I don't want to buy music, I listen to it on youtube. I avoid downloading them at least since I have started earning my own money.
This is about one of the biggest scams in the scientific world. One, which scientists are absolutely happy participating. And most are in fact proud of it. I am talking about the whole scientific publishing industry. To those who are unaware, most of this is industry is run by scientists who volunteer their time to edit and review scientific work, so that companies which eventually publish these works can make money. The initial purpose of charging money for viewing scientific literature was to cover the cost of actual publication. But with the advent of the internet it basically has become nothing more than an excuse to make money.
I may be a bleeding leftist who might believe that we could form a perfect socialist utopia but even I understand that in a pragmatic world making money is a great thing. But the way these scientific publishers try to cheat their customers gets to my nerve. And the fact that the people who are the avant grade of science are happy to let the publishers do this to the rest of their community is even more saddening. I say rest of their community because the avant grade sits cozily in their universities where they are able to get unlimited access to scientific literature thanks mostly to the public who funds their universities or research institutions.
Compare the scientific publishers to traditional publishers of news. These publishers have considerably higher costs as all the content they publish is either produced by them or purchased by them from news agencies. No one volunteers their time to edit the content in these publications. Yet, with the advent of the internet, these companies did not carry forward their models of subscription based access. A few do have pay-walls but even those publications allow a certain number of free articles before asking you to pay up. And when they ask you to pay, a publication like the New York Times will charge you $10 a month. Scientific publishers charge $40 for access to one article. A pdf file that occupies practically no space on their servers. One might argue that the advertisement revenue for traditional publishers is quite substantial. But the cost of scientific publishing in comparison is so small, that the need for charging such ridiculous amounts completely defies logic. I wouldn't be quite as angered if these publishers were not so greedy.
The mushrooming of several open access journals is a good thing. But, the struggles some of these journal have to undergo to attain legitimacy is also quite interesting to observe. I have heard even graduate students dismissing the work published in some mid-quality open access journals as nothing more than poor quality work that one pays to get published by an unknown publisher while not making any openly negative comments about traditional journals of the same quality.
I feel it reflects quite poorly on us a scientific community that free access to knowledge is considered to be worse than writing your work off to a third party so that he can make money just so that your ego is boosted momentarily.
Till this status quo exists I will happily download and provide copies of articles that my friends request.
P.S: I don't condone piracy in other industries. For example if I don't want to buy music, I listen to it on youtube. I avoid downloading them at least since I have started earning my own money.
2 comments:
From what I have read, it seems like server space can get costly. Wikipedia spends about $20 million every year to maintain its servers. I am not sure whether these journals store as much data as Wikipedia does but even then the cost of maintaining the severs could be in the millions. Having said that each university pays several hundred thousand dollars and sometimes in the millions to get access to the journals. And with so many universities that have active subscriptions, I don't know where all the money goes.
As you said the scientific community does look down upon papers published in open access journals. It is ironical because scientists are ones who are supposed to cricitically evaluate something before coming to a conclusion and here they are evaluating the quality of a paper based on the name of the journal.
Hopefully the next generation of scientists will think differently; having grown up on open source softwares and free Internet, they might embrace open access journals.
Niranj, I agree. There is definitely a cost. These servers at least in the current paradigm also need to be secure. But the amounts charged to the universities for annual subscriptions or to individuals for each article is ridiculous. That too for sharing information that was obtained with public funds in the first place.
Also some of the other suggestions with the publishing are quite interesting too. Suggestions like where you have open peer review. Put all your data and raw data on a website along with your analysis and interpretation and people who are interested will look at it and comment on it. In this way pressure on secrecy and publishing becomes less intense and science becomes a continuous process and not a series of milestones.
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