Scientists dare to be free
We had written, in the dimly-recalled days Before Edelman, of
the breathtaking avarice and crimes against scholarship of
academic publishing cartels.
Well, some professors aren’t all that absent-minded after
all, and they’re holding up a sign that says UNION.
- “Scientists
demand free science journal access”: “The Public
Library of Science has two aims. It wants free access to back
issues of scientific journals and an Internet search engine uniting
information from all journals”
- “Scientists threaten
journal protest”: “But the call to set up the
library is meeting resistance from publishers and academic
associations, which are keen to protect their copyright on
scientific papers.” Oh, but kids, it isn’t your
copyright, which belongs to the authors (or their institutions) and
is merely licensed. Now, is the license fair? Does it demand a
transfer of all or effectively all rights for the mere
privilege of being published? Is that extortion in drag?
- “PLoS response to Science
magazine”: “It is ironic that the Editors charge
the NLM or PubMedCentral with monopolistic ambitions, since it is
journal publishers, including the publishers of
Science, who currently exercise a permanent monopoly
over the distribution and use of every research article they print.
At present, no one can compete with Science [et al.].... One journal’s archives
cannot substitute for another’s, so the multiplicity of
journals does not undermine this monopoly control over
access.” Oligopoly (rule by a family) is the
appropriate term here; we also like cartel. “It
seems very unlikely that biomedical scientists would cancel their
subscriptions to Science or their favorite specialty
journals based on the knowledge that the primary research reports
can be read for free six months after publication! Most scientists
want to hear about the work even before it is published; that is
one major reason why they attend conferences and research
seminars”
- “Publish
Free or Perish”: Despite, in its title, yet another metastasis of the
self-evident pun this topic brings to mind, a real gem
of a story here.
- “ ‘I think scientists all over would be
shocked to realize what a phenomenally lucrative business
scientific publishing can be,’ Nicholas Cozzarelli,
editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the USA, says. ‘There are huge sums of
money to be had in this field.’ ” True but
irrelevant: The issue is universal access to knowledge, not a cut
of the pie. That’s cartel thinking, not
science thinking
- “Also, some journals worry that outside archives hosting
their articles will introduce errors into the files, lowering the
reliability of the information. What if a µg (microgram)
suddenly becomes a mg (milligram)? PubMed Central actually detected
errors in some of the papers they were given, thereby increasing
the overall quality. ‘The more eyes to look at it and fingers
trying to work with it, the more things you can find,’ says
David Lipman, director of the NCBI.” Um, no. Mark the damn
things up properly to begin with (diagrams and graphics must be
accessible), and/or publish in PDF
- “[I]nstead of billing readers, they plan to bill authors,
a practice that is already common in the form of page charges.
Overall, these submission charges would amount to only a small
fraction of a scientist’s total research costs, they say, and
could easily be included in research budgets. Libraries, freed from
subscription charges, could also chip in on behalf of authors at
their institutions. [Riiight. –
NUblog] ‘We feel it is
probably a better system to put the charges on the authors than the
other way round,’ says [some apologist].” You spend
money to do the research, spend money to get it published, and
spend money to subscribe and read it. This isn’t scholarship;
it’s a vanity press. (In drag.) “ ‘I remain
absolutely convinced that the real future of publishing, five years
out, is one in which nobody controls the
literature’ ”
Maybe content online does not pay. Maybe it ought to – the
commercial kind, the retail kind. But scientific
publishing is too important to be left in the hands of Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, and
the other “legitimate businessmen” protected by
heat-packing, high-forehead homunculi deep inside black limousines.
It is too valuable for the kinds of prices they’re
asking.
Posted on 2001-05-02