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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/16/academic-journal-publishers-universities-price-subscriptions?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content>
"If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were
unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits
the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.
The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley,
Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and
some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes
of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to
produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles,
vet them for quality and edit the journals.
Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to
these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the
research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to
journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated.
But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly
expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently,
many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by
paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or
library doesn’t subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled
article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.
The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage
to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda
spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and
prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of
Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political
philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned
philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many
of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and
democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal.
But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d
had enough, and resigned en masse.
We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something
different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access,
ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open
Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of
libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a
not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real
service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own
community. So why aren’t there more of them?"
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
