Should academic publications cost money to access?

There may be a case for G8 student fees or government funding to go up, so that university in Ghana can be subsidized to afford the same online subscriptions Canadian university students take for granted.

I think a year or two ago someone posted an article about this very subject. (I think it was Beltov, but I could be wrong)

That article mentioned that the people submitting the papers didn't actually get paid by the publications demanding money for access.  There's something entirely wrong with that.

Research costs money, and I don't mind paying to cover those costs, and a bit more in recognition of a person's skills and effort to provide the information.  So, I'm not entirely against some kind of fee structure.  Too bad it couldn't be geared to income.  Probably too cumbersome.

Another thing that struck me while reading this thread, is the consideration that Canadian Universities, through various avenues, are heavily funded by yours truly, and millions like me.   So, research coming out of Universities should certainly be made available to the public.

After all, we paid for it, and I'd be surprised if government research grants didn't include a requirement to share the results.  But, even research that is, say, privately funded is still done on or with the infrastructure of a heavily taxpayer financed campus.

A while back, I was trying my best to advise a person whose Dr. recomended electroshock therapy.  I have a negative "gut" reaction to this kind of therapy for several reasons.  However, I didn't want to advise on that basis,   I wanted data to show the efficacy of such treatments for that person's affliction.   If the data showed my "gut" reaction was wrong, I was more than prepared to change my mind.

While I could find lots of pro and con annecdotes, the only sites that hinted at having actual data were only willing to part with the information for a fee.    Which you have to pay before you see the goods.

But then, maybe my search techniques weren't good, I dunno.  

I can't see paying for data on a therapy that has been in use for over 80 years.   In the end, it just ended up re-enforcing my "gut"  feeling that said therapy was dangerous hokum.

Not only are academic authors not paid, in many fields they must pay the journal to print their work. That's because research leading to publication is considered an integral part of being a university professor -- you're paid to be a prof, and part of the job is to publish. Some newspapers have taken advantage of that to get themselves a lot of free op-eds.

Re the universal library, check out UNESCO's digital efforts at http://www.wdl.org/en/ and the resources listed at http://openreflections.wordpress.com/tag/universal-library/

Indeed -- thanks for the pointer!

The French librarian Gabriel Naudé wrote:

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And therefore I shall ever think it extreamly necessary, to collect for this purpose all sorts of books, (under such precautions, yet, as I shall establish) seeing a Library which is erected for the public benefit, ought to be universal; but which it can never be, unlesse it comprehend all the principal authors, that have written upon the great diversity of particular subjects, and chiefly upon all the arts and sciences; [...] For certainly there is nothing which renders a Library more recommendable, then when every man findes in it that which he is in search of Universal Library

The Universal Library is an ole concept and in this day and age one is able to discern the direction of what is happening in terms of information dissemination and how control of the web by corporate entities can have an adverse effect to what is inherently right to allowing people access to information. So if you are able to identify a "niche market" that has not be capitalized by the selling off of by privatizing Governments, what would you like to do to allow advancements in society that does not know race,gender, or age discrimination, as to who shall have this right too, and who shall not according to the cost of?

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"It is perhaps the oldest university in the world."Library of Alexandria discovered

ON a side note.

So if you are seeing now what benefit there might be for Google, you might understand how advertising and the extent of on a free internet access?  One can see how they could benefit by use of their browser?

The save TV process was countered by those who are trying to control the internet? How is one to gain from "free tv" if not from advertising as well? Cost of accessing the portal of the internet. Starbucks coffee anyone, or perhaps a library visit . Or maybe even a Gas Station, or, possibly a hotel?

Just nice to see the Network in terms of Web Science mapping as to it's evolution of information freely accessed as a possibility.

(Click On Image for Larger Viewing)

Oh, I agree. I do think daily papers filling up their op-ed pages with free writing from academics rather than paying writers is a bit dicey from a labour-rights perspective, though.

Stephen Gordon wrote:

Huh? Is the goal of journalism to provide income for journalists or to inform the public? What's the point of paying an amateur to make a hash of a complicated subject instead of running a piece by someone who actually understands the subject?

Not even close to what I said. 

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What's the point of paying an amateur to make a hash of a complicated subject instead of running a piece by someone who actually understands the subject?

I wonder what an economist thinks about scientists offering up new perspectives about their respective field?

To be clear, even a scientist doing his summation, concluding in book form, or article, not having the up to date information will always have to consider the addendum for having been proofed wrong on the synopsis,  how would they know about Mandelstam or his work knowing full well who is doing what at the front? Maybe an economist knows better?

I can proof this example just to assure that what I am saying has a "basis in fact" and what one assumes by explanation in comparison "to feeling better about,"  in no way reduces what had been put forward in abstraction. Stick to what you know then rather then by opinion surmise that all is wrong with what some layman's work. Blogging made it ways past what media controlled liken you to hear and see. Faster reporting with "on the spot."

I am sensitive to Ze's point about labor and rights of journalists, in this kind of world, yet I do not refrain from buying magazines of articles that interest. It is something thousands of worker are facing current with regard to the restructuring of society once jobs are going.

torontoprofessor wrote:

I might also add that the situation is worse for academic books than it is for academic journal articles (which so far have been the main focus of this discussion so far): it's even harder to find an academic book for free, legally, than it is to find an academic journal article.

I suppose that's true, in that you usually can't find them online (Google Books, for better or worse, is trying to change that), but almost every academic book of merit, and thousands of none, are available for free at University libraries which still function as centres of research. Isn't there something to be said on how this research model works? That is, that it eschews easy individual acquisition for a system that funds central, communal aggregation?

Smaller libraries often point to inter-library loan to counter this. But they often charge for the service, fees like $20 to have a bit of microfiche brought in.

Given the existence of the internet, every academic could skip the whole process of submitting articles to journals, and of submitting books to academic presses, and simply publish everything s/he writes online. Indeed, many academics already do this, both in the sciences and the humanities. This is a far more effective way of disseminating your work than publishing it in an academic journal or an academic press.

So what useful function, if any, do academic journals and academic presses serve? The funciton that occurs to me is simply this: they referee the articles and books before publishing them. This is useful as a sort of filtering mechanism (though it has its down side). Surely, such a function could be performed at a much lower cost?

My understanding is that the only thing I cannot make public is the actual pdf file that the journal publishes. I could make available my final submission and not worry about copyright issues.

And as torontoprof says, the real role of journals is the refereeing process they provide - and referees work for free.

I am concerned with the general public's access, and also with the access of people at poorer universities in the third world. It's a question in the back of my mind.

There's different levels of "access" to consider, also.  The type of academic writting, or communication in these kinds of journals is often written, necessarily, for other scientists in the same or related field.  By necessity, the "jargon" might be more of a stumbling block to access by the general public than money.

For example, last week I visited the weather chanel on line, which I haven't for a long time.  They've switched the radar map program, which allows you to zoom into a satelilte map with a high enough resolution that major urban areas show, along with highways.  So, while playing around with it, I noticed it just kept going and going.  So, I "followed" all the way north to a group of islands I've always been kinda curious about, in Hudson Bay, because of their isolation and odd shape-- the Belcher islands.   Sorry for the details, just showing the segues of the mind.  Or what passes for one.  ANYWAY I got curious about the geology, googled it, and came up with a very academic article.  A few paragraphs in, I realized I didn't have the time to really read it, because I'd be investing a good amount of time looking up specialized words.  Which I will get to.  I've done the same when I was curious about the geology of the Bruce Peninsula.   It can be done.   But I wonder how much curiosity outside of the scientific community is stiffled by this kind of obsticle.

This isn't a critique of "ivory tower egg heads".  There's no doubt in my mind that such precise language between scientists in academic papers is unavoidable.  But, it's a barrier nonetheless.

In keeping with I guess what has turned out to be an experiment featuring an ordinary dullard and academic journals,  I came across some difficulty today.

While tooling around the net looking for this and that, a site that promised a geologic transect across the Grenville orogen (an uplifting subject matter, in my view) came to my attention.   Going to the page, I found it was just an abstract.  But the page lead me on to the National Research Council, which promises (actually, teases is more appropriate)  "Free access to Scientific Journals".   It looks like a promising source, actually, but there doesn't seem to be a one page index where a person can look at all the subjects.  It seems to me if you are looking for information on a particular subject, you'd have to click through every back issue. 

Kinda clumsy.

Former Reddit co-owner arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads

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Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old wunderkind who co-authored the RSS specification at age 14 and sold his stake in Reddit to Condé Nast (which also owns Ars Technica) before his 20th birthday, was arrested Tuesday on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, "unlawfully obtaining information from," and "recklessly damaging" a "protected computer." He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so.

Swartz is a founder of the advocacy organization Demand Progress. In a statement, Demand Progress executive director David Segal blasted the arrest. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library," he said. Demand Progress also quoted James Jacobs, the Government Documents Librarian at Stanford University, who said that the arrest "undermines academic inquiry and democratic principles." 

According to the complaint, Swartz purchased a laptop in September 2010 and registered it under the name "Gary Host" (username: "ghost") on the MIT network. He then ran a Python script that rapidly downloaded articles from the JSTOR. JSTOR detected the script and blocked his IP address. The complaint alleges that there followed a game of cat and mouse in which Swartz repeatedly changed his IP and MAC address to evade JSTOR and MIT's efforts to block access. Swartz also bought a second laptop to speed up the downloading process. Finally, on October 9, JSTOR gave up and and blocked the entire MIT campus from using JSTOR.

Academic Work Should Be Distributed For Free

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Most likely, the lasting benefit of his actions will be to elevate the salience of the underlying issue on which Lee, Swartz, and I are all in agreement. And here’s the issue. Right now in academic publishing, what you have is basically a lot of donor- and government-financed nonprofit organizations taking outputs with near-zero distribution costs (electronic journal archives) and selling them to each other. For any one institution, this kind of makes sense. A publisher doesn’t want to give up his fees, which are valuable in meeting the costs of producing scholarship. But on net, it’s a mix of pointless and pernicious. Sale of access to journals helps finance scholarship, but it also raises the cost of scholarship. If everything was distributed for free, the whole exact same enterprise could be undertaken with no net financial loss. But there would be huge potential gains. A precocious 17 year-old could have free access to scholarship. So could a researcher living and working in a poor country. Or even an earnest political reporter who’s working on an issue and curious about what political science has to say about it. When I, personally, come across an article I’d like to read but can’t get free access to, my standard practice is to tweet about it and then someone affiliated with a university sends it to me. That’s good for me and, I think, good for the world. But there’s no reason curious people should need to amass thousands of twitter followers before they’re able to gain access to information that’s been produced by non-profit institutions that are supposed to be serving the public interest.

Som eof the biggest organizations making money off academic publications have nothing to do with the authors, or the institutions:

http://boingboing.net/2011/04/26/lessig-on-science-co.html

The video is long, but well-worth watching to the end, especially when it gets into the subject of online creativity.

George Monbiot: The Lairds of Learning

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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....

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.

1 pound for 24 hour access to the Times? Thats a bargain! Espeically considering how much you would pay for a single copy of the newspaper.

The academic stuff should be as reasonable

LOL Only if you dont like the times. If you do, its a bargain and I would be happy if all publications did that.

Its reasonable

Elsevier Backs Down, Removes Support For Research Works Act As Elsevier Boycott Grows

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While it never got as much attention as the GoDaddy boycott, it appears the growing boycott of academics, refusing to publish papers in any Reed Elsevier journal, has caused the company to back down. It has now announced that it no longer supports the Research Works Act. That's the bill -- for which Elsevier was a major backer -- that would bar the government from requiring open and free access (after a period of time) to government-funded research:

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While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders.

Of course, then it immediately complains about the kinds of mandates that the Act would have disallowed:

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Cooperation and collaboration are critical because different kinds of journals in different fields have different economics and models. Inflexible mandates that do not take those differences into account and do not involve the publisher in decision making can undermine the peer-reviewed journals that serve an essential purpose in the research community. Therefore, while withdrawing support for the Research Works Act, we will continue to join with those many other nonprofit and commercial publishers and scholarly societies that oppose repeated efforts to extend mandates through legislation.

 

That's pretty ridiculous actually. None of these mandates "undermine" these journals in any way -- unless you consider their insane set up (free writing, free editing, full copyright ownership, and subscriptions that cost tens of thousands of dollars) some sort of divine right. The mandates refer to federally funded research, which should be accessible by the public since they paid for the research in the first place. Elsevier doesn't pay for the research. Hell, they don't even pay the researcher for their paper. Or the peer reviewers for their work. So forgive me for not shedding any tears if Elsevier has to learn to adapt to only being able to have the exclusive rights to a paper for a year.