Academic research publishing is an economic scam and the peer review process is dramatically influenced by both luck (in terms of who you get to review your paper and how they're feeling when they review it) and who you know.
There...I said what everyone actually thinks.
Originally shared by John Baez
Let us read what we paid for
Imagine a business like this: you get highly trained experts to give you their research for free... and then you sell it back to them. Of course these experts need equipment, and they need to earn a living... so you get taxpayers to foot the bill.
And if the taxpayers want to actually read the papers they paid for? Then you charge them a big fee!
It's not surprising that with this business model, big publishers are getting rich while libraries go broke. Reed-Elsevier has a 37% profit margin!
But people are starting to fight back — from governments to energetic students like Alexandra Elbakyan here.
On Friday, the Competitiveness Council —a gathering of European ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry—said that all publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe should be made free to access by 2020.
This will start a big fight, and it may take longer than 2020. But Alexandra Elbakyan isn't waiting around.
In 2011, as a computer science grad student in Kazakhstan, she got sick of paying big fees to read science papers. She set up SciHub, a pirate website that steals papers from the publishers and sets them free.
SciHub now has 51,000,000 papers in its database. In October 2015, Elsevier sued them. In November, their domain name was shut down. But they popped up somewhere else. By February, people were downloading 200,000 papers per day. Even scientists with paid access to the publisher's databases are starting to use SciHub, because it's easier to use.
Clearly piracy is the not the ultimate solution. Elbakyan now lives in an undisclosed location, to avoid being extradited. But she gave the world a much-needed kick in the butt. The old business model of get smart people to work for free and sell the product back to them is on its way out.
For more, read:
John Bohannon, Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone, Science, 28 April 2016, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
and especially the SciHub Twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub
Also read this:
Martin Enserink, In dramatic statement, European leaders call for ‘immediate’ open access to all scientific papers by 2020, Science,
27 May 2016, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement-european-leaders-call-immediate-open-access-all-scientific-papers
The Dutch government is really pushing this! Congratulations to them!
#openaccess
Well done Craig Froehle! You know, if everyone just spoke openly what we know is true, it wouldn't take too long to significantly reduce corrupt practices. I don't think we can ever eliminate it all, but this kind of openness can have a huge effect, really bringing it down.
ReplyDeleteThe internet was both a communications/control package but intended to share information as well, so that researchers could do what they're doing with SciHub.
ReplyDeleteI'm just surprised it's taken this long to put a big dent in the journals.
ReplyDeleteI thought internet speed was much faster than this.
David Belliveau Most people who care the most about access to journals are all busy writing grants, papers, and books and trying to get tenure, not fighting the very system they're trying hard to be permitted to remain a part of.
ReplyDelete