The stupidity of publishing in academia
Everything in academe is slow. But not everything in academia is stupid. Our relationship to for-profit publishers surely ranks among the most perverse elements of academic operations. The boycott of Elsevier — in which academics refuse to provide free editorial work, peer reviews, and articles submissions (for articles that took months of research and probably some taxpayer $$) — is stretching into a fourth year.
In 2012, Cambridge University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers started a boycott against Elsevier, for-profit publisher of 2,651 journals (and counting). He wrote, “I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.” Gowers called for a public website where other mathematicians could join him and Tyler Neylon built the The Cost of Knowledge a website still collecting signatures and public refusals to do free work for Elsevier’s 2,600+ journals.
For academics, Elsevier’s profit margin of 39 percent has been characterized as “economic censorship” by independent scholar Paul Aarden. For someone unaffiliated with a university like Aarden, getting access to research published in Elsevier is nearly impossible. An individual subscription to a single Elsevier journal is more than $500 per year. Imagine having to pay to subscribe to the 20 or 30 that might be relevant in a particular field.
Most of Elsevier’s customers are university libraries. University Librarian (now Emeritus) James Neal at Columbia University in New York, gave an interview to radio show On the Media in 2012, in which he divulged that his library has to pay roughly $20,000 for each Elsevier journal. What’s more — and what Neal could not discuss due to Non-Disclosure Agreements for-profit publishers like Elsevier force libraries to sign — publishers force libraries to buy bundles of journals, putting journals like Cell and The Lancet in pacakges with journals of much lower rank. Librarians are then unable to select only the most relevant titles to keep costs down. This is similar to the business model of the much maligned cable companies, except that television content providers pay their writers, producers, and actors.
Since 2012, only 16,331 scholars have publicly agreed to curtail or halt their editorial and peer review work, and/or send their work to, say, open access journals that make the articles they publish available for free.
Mathematics Professor Miklos Abert writing in support of his sign-on to The Cost of Knowledge petition addresses Elsevier directly, “We do not really need you guys. You still need us, so get off your high horse (and your high prices).”
So why don’t scholars escape the Elsevier system for turning their academic freedom into corporate profits? Frankly, it’s because scholars still operate in organizations in which the reputation of the journals matters a great deal when it comes to hiring and tenure cases. On the positive side, the movement to make scholarly work free and publicly available is still happening. The Cost of Knowledge website gathered over a hundred new signatories last week, more than four years since it launched and had media coverage. New open access journals have been launched, offering alternatives to Elsevier and the other for-profit publishers. Existing open access repositories like arxiv.org are being replicated in other fields by bioarxiv.org and socarxiv.org.
The repositories are un-ranked and the articles in them are not peer-reviewed in the traditional double-blind way (though we all know that reviewers and authors are often known to each other). This means the arxivs of the academic world will likely continue to be treated as risky publishing venues for those among us with less power who have to rely on conformity to long-held norms to advance our careers. Elsevier’s top journals accrued reptutational strength over time. As confidence in for-profit publishers continues to erode, confidence in newer publishing platforms will increase.
What is at stake is larger than the careers of individual scholars. Professor of Engineering at the University of Sevilla, Miguel A. Aguirre shares an attitude held by many scholars and tax payers, “As a researcher [at a public university], I’m a public servant. Society pays me for education and research activities. Results belong to society.” Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and founding director of both the Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation argues, “we are seeing the beginning of a monopoly control of the scholarly record”. Monopoly control and public service do not mix well.
In a knowledge economy, it is increasingly true that those who control the knowledge have the power. Limiting access to scholarly knowledge threatens to slow innovation (which could be fatal for those suffering from disease), siphon financial capital away from the core centers of knowledge production and into the periphery of for-profit publishers, and slow the creation of much-needed platforms for sharing software, data, and code that are increasingly necessary for reproducibility in science but exceed the traditional article formats.
Because of the increasingly computational, data-driven practice of science it is even more important now than it was in 2012 to continue to demand transparency and access to scholarly outputs, including but not limited to the papers themselves. We have a chance now to establish data and code sharing practices outside the for-profit umbrella.
