Upulie Divisekera, prolific tweeter and all-around awesome scientist, wanted to write a thing about open access and was nice enough to ask me for some help. The result, which you can find on Crikey and read for free, captures the costs of publishing and the avenues through which journal publishers make obscene operating profits.
Long story short, it’s because the publishers have convinced academics to give them all their work for free, as well as do the quality assurance tasks. Then they charge the same communities of academics to access them, or they actually charge authors to give them their work for free in the first place. And through all of that, the costs of publishing have probably decreased because everything is online now, instead of in actual printed books that sit in libraries gathering dust. When we think about it like that, it doesn’t make the academics seem very smart. And it’s kind of true. I’ll explain why…
In case you didn’t catch the link to the article, which proved to be quite popular, then here it is.
Why science doesn’t belong to everyone (yet)
After the cost of knowledge became a thing, more and more of mainstream academia started to think about the open access movement and started to jump on the golden bandwagon. Essentially, open access just shifts the costs of publishing from the library to the scientist, but the money comes from the public either way, so I personally don’t see how this sort of shake-up will have a direct effect on the actual cost of knowledge.
There’s a simpler approach that should be considered the responsibility of every research academic considering the submission of a piece of research. And that is to check the self-archiving rules for each journal. It turns out that most of the decent journals to which we might consider submitting work allow researchers to upload pre-prints (yellow) or post-prints (blue/green) already (some after a delay), and most of them will publish your work for free. The journals that don’t give researchers the ability to self-archive are a small enough proportion that they are easily avoided without having to sacrifice readership, impact (and yes, your choice of journal does matter) and good old-fashioned prestige.
And then just let Google work its magic.
Soon enough, your pdf is available as one of “All X versions” on Google Scholar, and will be linked directly to your institutions’ (or your own) webpages. And if you are looking for an article of mine that is “behind a paywall”, google it first before you start bitching about it on the internet because the post-print version is available at the click of a button.
So why aren’t people doing it properly already?
Because it’s not new. It’s not a buzz word. Blue and green coloured-things might not as desirable as gold. But it is important. And if you’re a researcher, you owe it to the public to know it and get it right, on time, every time.
adam g. dunn 