why scientists want to starve a publishing beast
After my first introduction to the business model employed by publishers of scientific papers, I had an urge to apply for a job with one as quickly as possible. Here’s why. Normally, when you produce a product or deliver a service, you have to invest the time into researching what you need to create, spend the money on creating all the necessary prototypes to make sure you’re on the right track, then release your final iteration and hope that you’ll make your money back after the sales figures are in. Not so with a scientific publisher. Scientists submit work for which either a university or a government, or both, have paid. Other scientists review the work for free, in their spare time. The final papers are edited for free by volunteers. And without spending a dime on making or acquiring their core product, publishers bundle what they’ve been given and charge exorbitant fees for it. So you can see why it may seem tempting to become a scientific journal editor. It’s a business with low cost, low risk, and depending on how you run it, has huge profit margins. So what if it seals off scientific knowledge by appropriating it under a copyright, even if this work has been publicly funded and intended for the public?
If your first reaction was to think "holy crap, this is wrong on so many levels," you’re certainly not alone. One of the absolute worst abusers of copyright law and predatory publishing practices in science, Elsevier, has now become a target for scientists fed up with having to pay an arm and a leg to view research appropriated and pay-walled at ridiculous terms. You see, simply selling subscriptions to journals isn’t enough for Elsevier. To make sure their less popular journals are also making money, the publisher bundles them with their popular publications and demands that the universities either buy everything or nothing at all. This is the same as the local supermarket demanding that for every basic staple you buy, you also have to purchase the old fish they don’t want in the freezer anymore, but on which they still want to make a profit, and should you decide to stick with just the staples you wanted to get, they won’t let you buy them. Unfortunately for scientists, they don’t have much of a choice but ask their universities to pay up since Elsevier’s massive collection includes journals the community needs to read to keep up to date on the current bleeding edge research. And things get even more unfair when they have to pony up $30 a paper to read a study that was funded with public cash.
Again, even if it is gouging, we could forgive Elsevier. After all, they are a company, they’re selling information, and the information is in very high demand. But the information they’re selling doesn’t really belong to them in the first place. They just slapped their label on it, claimed copyright, and started charging everyone to read the work they didn’t create and for which they didn’t even pay. On top of that, they supported SOPA, PIPA, and sent numerous donations to two politicians to push the RWA, a particularly nasty bill intended to keep the scientific work funded by the public under their copyright claims despite government bodies arguing that research paid for by the public should be freely available to the public. After all, if thousands of publicly funded papers had to be freely accessible online, Elsevier would lose millions of dollars by being unable to play middleman within the scientific community and charge for them. It’s this attitude that many scientists rightly find unforgivable. It’s not their goal to hoard information form each other and the public because all they would end up doing is hurt themselves in the process by not knowing who’s doing what, how, and why. Scientific work is by nature a very collaborative effort and the vast majority of studies build on hundreds of those that came before them. Instead of making knowledge available to the world, publishers like Elsevier effectively treat it as a commodity.
But what can scientists do against a publishing goliath? Starve it. If Elsevier wants to sell papers, it needs the steady stream of submissions from scientists to add to its inventory. No papers means no product to sell and ultimately, a hit to the bottom line. This is why the boycotting scientists aren’t only refusing to buy access, they also refuse to review and submit papers. With this triple punch they hope to not just starve Elsevier’s journals of content to sell and of cash, but to also undermine their peer review status. As we recently saw, a bad peer review process can undermine an entire journal in a heartbeat, especially today. At the same time, more and more of them are turning to open access journals which charge as much as $2,000 per submission but have strict peer review guidelines and make studies available for free. Having read a lot of great work from journals like these without having to pay a dime, I have a very good feeling about scientists going to a PLoS model and publishing their work for the entire public. Yes, the up front costs for submissions are significant, but it’s worth it to ensure that your work can be accessed and read by all those interested in your research rather than used as a tool to make money by a corporation abusing copyright laws.
This is a symptom of a larger problem, which you touched on by pointing to PIPA and SOPA. Individual rights to intellectual property are under attack, and while I tend to not be terribly liberal on a lot of matters, this is one I’m staunchly anti-corporation and anti-conservative. Of course, this movement toward corporate rights with IP is tied into piracy, but piracy is just a nice buzzword to excuse the erosion of rights both on the content creation side and the consumer side.
I recently had an idea for an android/iphone app that could make some money. It would be marketed toward corporations and could save them a bunch of money in the long term, so I sought out a patent lawyer for a consultation. I was horrified at the amount of hurdles I have to jump through before I can even start developing the application, as the company I work for and the company that contracts us might both have claims to the idea before I even start putting it together… simply because I’m employed by them. This might even apply even though the idea was not had nor developed on their property.
I’m getting a bit off topic at this point, but the issue is much larger than science publishing. I say good for the scientific community for trying to make a stand. I hope it has an impact.
The danger with a submitter pays model, is the submitter becomes the “customer”. And they are buying peer approval. The temptation to maximise income by softening approvals is always there.
But I don’t get why the protesting scientists are substituting one expensive journal model for another. If the papers are voluntarily submitted, voluntarily reviewed, and voluntarily edited… what the hell do you need to pay for? Use the Wikipedia publication model. Small donations keep the servers funded. Everything else is voluntary.
(And since the content would be GPL’d (or some variant), if anyone wants to publish a physical Journal Of Something by bundling their favourite papers, they can. If they have good taste, it becomes the bible of the field. If they get greedy, anyone can jump into their space because the papers are online and available for any rival.)
Paul,
You’re actually voicing the same complaint about open access journals as Chad Orzel and you’re right. An exceedingly high up front cost is not that much different form paying for journal access. As for the Wikipedia-style publishing model, there’s already a good example of one, arXiv, which you see me tear into on a regular basis. But the volume of submissions means there’s no way you can peer-review them all and scientists don’t want to give up peer review.
That hefty $2,000 price tag for PloS journals is in part there to discourage anyone and everyone from submitting a paper and by throttling the stream of submissions, they can review them before publishing them. And you need peer review of some sort.
Since there are people who trawl the arXiv submissions just for fun, it should be possible to have a tiered approval/review/edit process. Low level volunteer reviewers (including non-scientists) do an initial sanity-check on the submissions, culling the wackos. Second tier review culls the bad science. The short list goes into the formal review and editing process.
While an occasional good paper may be left behind, a) that happens with journals now. b) the original submission still gets published in arXiv, or similar, it just doesn’t get in the peer-reviewed subset.
From the article, re: Higher level coordination. “Those people won’t work for free– somebody is going to want to draw a salary for doing those jobs.”
Again, Wikipedia suggests otherwise. Even high level admin and coordination is voluntary.
As a librarian I have to defend PLOS here. 2000 dollars upfront isn’t that much money for publication and a global audience. Most research worthy of publication will have cost a multitude of this sum even if it’s just a single phd student doing some work in the archives. Just figure it into the cost of any research proposal as the last item; publication fee in peer reviewed open access journal: $2000, total grant requested: $14.002.000.
“That hefty $2,000 price tag for PloS journals”
erm… you mean $1350 . The main PLoS journal (PLoS ONE) charges $1350 which I think is extremely reasonable as that comes with unlimited room for high-quality, colour images, figures and datasets.
Compare this with say the journal Cell which charges “$1000 for the first color figure and $275 for each additional color figure.” [source: http://www.cell.com/authors and I think you’ll find there are clear cases where publishing in OA journals is not only cheaper upfront, but also allows for the publication of better quality (higher-resolution, colour) and quantity of figures.
Advantages over-and-above that it’s free to access, redistribute and re-use for everyone. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
And yes, as Harold says – publication costs are factored into grant proposals, so that’s not an issue.
…and PLoS offer a fee-waiver for disadvantaged scientists that can’t afford the usual APC (article processing charge). [source: http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ ]
So your assertion that the “price tag for PloS journals is in part there to discourage anyone and everyone from submitting a paper” is categorically untrue.
erm… you mean $1350
Well Ross, as you said, PLoS ONE charges $1,350 per submission but as the pricing page shows, every other journal charges between $2,250 and $2,900 so I think $2,000 or so is a fair assessment of how much it costs to submit to PLoS journals.
As for waiver, it seems like the policy for PLoS is “check the box and wait” rather than an explicit guarantee that you can have the fee waived if you can’t afford it.