The Guardian; The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism
In California the state university system has been paying $11m
(£8.3m) a year for access to Elsevier journals, but it has just
announced that it won’t be renewing these subscriptions. In Britain and Europe the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies.
In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British
scientific research is now published under open access terms: either
freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year
or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on
general release.
Yet, somehow, the new system has not yet worked out any cheaper for
the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make
their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover
the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to
$5,000, and apparently the work gets more expensive the more that
publishers do it. A report last year
from Professor Adam Tickell pointed out that the costs both of
subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” has been steadily
rising at a rate above inflation ever since the UK’s open access policy
was adopted in 2012. In some ways the scientific publishing model
resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in
exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few
big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a
rebalancing of power."
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