This is not unprecedented: in 2006, the editorial board of the journal Topology (also an Elsevier journal) resigned en masse. The journal folded the following year.
Leaving entirely aside that the profit motive has absolutely no place in science, It’s frankly unthinkable to me that publicly-sponsored research is permitted to be paywalled at all. I’ve paid for it through taxes; why is it acceptable to make me pay again to see the results?
I think the rationale of paywalls for journals is that you aren’t paying for the paper, you are paying for the people who review the article and filter or reject badly written articles. I think it’s safe to say the Elsevier seems to care more about profit than informing people of the science.
Most reviewers for academic journals are volunteers—they do it for the prestige or the good of their field (depending on how cynical you want to be about their motivation. ;). Most of the subscription fee to a journal goes to professional proofreading (a worthwhile and non-trivial expense), typesetting (similarly, though in some fields LaTeX fills in more than adequately), administrative overhead (minimal for a non-profit, independently-administered journal) and lining the pockets of the journal owners. Open access journals can be implemented with the same level of peer-review for an almost negligible cost if you’re willing to forego proofreading and make authors typeset their own papers. (I can’t speak to academia at large, but math, CS and physics all predominantly write papers in LaTeX and get professional-quality typesetting as an automatic consequence.)
I know that the NIH has had a public access policy in place for a while. Authors have to make their work available via NCBI (I think within six months of publishing). Don’t know about other funding agencies. Journals tend to own the copyright to their typesetting, so authors generally upload the final submitted manuscript.
I’ve always thought journals were expensive, but the prices I saw on that page were insane. As much of a problem as this is, I am not sure that Open Access is necessarily the correct way to go as it seems to encourage the more dubious (in my opinion) author-pays model.
This article gives a nice insight into a journal that operates without charging authors or consumers. Obviously doesn’t fit for every case and I’d be interested in more options (that are fiscally sound) for Open Access other than author-pays. I’ve seen solutions where the articles are pay walled until 6-12 months later, but that doesn’t feel like a solution. Maybe a pay-what-you-want (not ppv) access (with none as an option)?
As far as investigating business models that might work for journals, it would be very useful to know what the revenue breakdown is. Is it mostly institutional subscriptions, or individual purchases? Are individual purchases mostly of recent papers, or more of influential classics?
I’ll be surprised if this data is available though. :)
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some numbers somewhere, but in a presentation rather than written down. For at least the scientific journals they were talking about, it was like >95% institutional subscriptions.
This is not unprecedented: in 2006, the editorial board of the journal Topology (also an Elsevier journal) resigned en masse. The journal folded the following year.
Leaving entirely aside that the profit motive has absolutely no place in science, It’s frankly unthinkable to me that publicly-sponsored research is permitted to be paywalled at all. I’ve paid for it through taxes; why is it acceptable to make me pay again to see the results?
I think the rationale of paywalls for journals is that you aren’t paying for the paper, you are paying for the people who review the article and filter or reject badly written articles. I think it’s safe to say the Elsevier seems to care more about profit than informing people of the science.
That rationale might hold up if the money we paid went to the reviewers, but it doesn’t.
Most reviewers for academic journals are volunteers—they do it for the prestige or the good of their field (depending on how cynical you want to be about their motivation. ;). Most of the subscription fee to a journal goes to professional proofreading (a worthwhile and non-trivial expense), typesetting (similarly, though in some fields LaTeX fills in more than adequately), administrative overhead (minimal for a non-profit, independently-administered journal) and lining the pockets of the journal owners. Open access journals can be implemented with the same level of peer-review for an almost negligible cost if you’re willing to forego proofreading and make authors typeset their own papers. (I can’t speak to academia at large, but math, CS and physics all predominantly write papers in LaTeX and get professional-quality typesetting as an automatic consequence.)
I know that the NIH has had a public access policy in place for a while. Authors have to make their work available via NCBI (I think within six months of publishing). Don’t know about other funding agencies. Journals tend to own the copyright to their typesetting, so authors generally upload the final submitted manuscript.
I’ve always thought journals were expensive, but the prices I saw on that page were insane. As much of a problem as this is, I am not sure that Open Access is necessarily the correct way to go as it seems to encourage the more dubious (in my opinion) author-pays model.
This article gives a nice insight into a journal that operates without charging authors or consumers. Obviously doesn’t fit for every case and I’d be interested in more options (that are fiscally sound) for Open Access other than author-pays. I’ve seen solutions where the articles are pay walled until 6-12 months later, but that doesn’t feel like a solution. Maybe a pay-what-you-want (not ppv) access (with none as an option)?
As far as investigating business models that might work for journals, it would be very useful to know what the revenue breakdown is. Is it mostly institutional subscriptions, or individual purchases? Are individual purchases mostly of recent papers, or more of influential classics?
I’ll be surprised if this data is available though. :)
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some numbers somewhere, but in a presentation rather than written down. For at least the scientific journals they were talking about, it was like >95% institutional subscriptions.