Last week I received an email from the academic publishing giant Elsevier, inviting me to check out Elsevier’s new Open Science page. I don’t believe for one minute that Elsevier supports open science, but I found the email encouraging, because it shows that even Elsevier knows its current business model is unsustainable.
Here's how traditional scientific publishing works. Say that you are a researcher and you think that walking may help kids with anxiety. So you design a study where you randomly assign kids to take walks or not, and you measure their anxiety symptoms.
The study will cost money: You’ll have to buy pedometers for the kids and hire a research assistant to help you do the work. So you apply for and receive a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), an organization funded by U.S. taxpayers. You do the study and find that walking does indeed lower kids' anxiety. So far, so good.
Now you must get the research published. You send it to a traditional journal. In the social sciences, about 70 percent of these journals are owned by one of the "big four" academic publishers: Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, or Taylor & Francis. The journal may charge you a fee for submitting (e.g., $75 or $140).
At the journal, an editor sends your work to several expert reviewers. The editor and reviewers are scientists like you, who receive no money from the journal. Once the editor accepts the paper, the journal might charge you another fee to cover the cost of printing (about $100-$250 per page) and for color figures ($150-$1,000 each).
Now the journal slaps a copyright on the paper, and charges people money to read it. Big universities spend millions of dollars per year on journal subscriptions—a cost ultimately borne by their students. But researchers and students at other institutions face a per-paper charge of $20-$50. Are you a clinical psychologist, doctor, or teacher who wants to keep up with the science in your area? That’ll be $50. Does someone in your family have a rare disease that you want to learn about? Still $50. It doesn’t matter if the paper was published last week or 40 years ago: $50.
Take a minute to consider the economics here. The researcher who did the work was funded by tuition dollars (in the form of a university salary) and by tax dollars in the form of the NSF grant. The editor and reviewers were also paid by their universities. The journal paid no one a cent. Now the journal gets to put the paper on their website and watch the money roll in. Michael Eisen, founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), compares this to an obstetrician who, upon delivering your baby, claims ownership of it and leases it back to you for a high annual fee.
You may be wondering why scientists continue to go along with this obviously exploitative system. The answer is that they are scared. In order to get and keep a job in science, one must publish research in 'high-impact' journals, many of which are owned by the big four publishers. "Impact" is a measure of how often a journal's articles are cited. Impact factors started out as a tool for librarians but they have evolved, stupidly, into a measure of prestige.
I say "stupidly" for two reasons: First, the internet makes it easy to track the citations for each individual paper. So who cares about the journal average? Second, there is no correlation between a journal's impact factor and the reliability of the science published in it. In fact, high-impact journals are forced to retract more of their papers than other journals. The idea that a journal's impact factor tells us anything about the quality of a particular article published in that journal is simply false. But old habits die hard, and today's scholars still feel pressure to publish in journals with high impact factors, which forces them to do business with the big four.
And the publishers do provide a small service by helping authors to preserve their work and present it in a professional way. The problem is that they charge exorbitantly for this service, which can actually be done quite inexpensively, as evidenced by the growing number of high-quality, open-access, online journals that charge authors nothing, take no advertising and operate at minimal cost using open-source software.
So the scientific community is getting fed up. Earlier this year, Germany and Sweden walked away from Elsevier rather than keep paying the absurd subscription prices. In solidarity, 41 professors from all over Germany resigned from editorships at Elsevier journals. Groups in the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, the U.K., Peru, Taiwan and my own University of California are demanding change.
Belgium recently amended its copyright law to allow researchers to share their work freely starting a year after publication, no matter what the publishing contract says. More than 17,200 individual researchers have joined a boycott of Elsevier, and the editorial boards of 26 different journals have resigned en masse and re-opened, independent of the publishers, as non-commercial, open-access journals.
What would an ethical business model for Elsevier look like? I'm in favor of a transparent fee-for-service model. The publishers provide a modest service, and they should be paid a modest fee for it. In the deal the German consortium tried (and failed) to reach with Elsevier, universities would pay a one-time publication fee when a member of their faculty published a paper, and all the papers would be free to read, worldwide.
The publishers didn't go for it. Why would they? They're understandably happy with the way things are now. In a recent Twitter exchange, an Elsevier employee responded to criticism of the company by saying: “Yes, everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y'all keep wishing for that, I'll keep working on producing the best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.” But that’s just it: Elsevier doesn’t produce knowledge— It sells access to knowledge that was delivered to its doorstep by volunteers. We need to stop volunteering.
As a parting thought, I will leave you with three suggestions. (For more ideas, see Chambers, 2017.)
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits, and that everyone has the right to share in the "moral and material interests" of any scientific product they author. The current publishing model violates both these principles. Like most scientists, I'm willing to give up my "material interest" in the knowledge I produce, as long as that knowledge is freely shared. What I'm not willing to do is watch publishers use that knowledge to extort billions of dollars per year from my students, my colleagues worldwide, and the public that already paid for the research. It's time for things to change.
Here's how traditional scientific publishing works. Say that you are a researcher and you think that walking may help kids with anxiety. So you design a study where you randomly assign kids to take walks or not, and you measure their anxiety symptoms.
The study will cost money: You’ll have to buy pedometers for the kids and hire a research assistant to help you do the work. So you apply for and receive a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), an organization funded by U.S. taxpayers. You do the study and find that walking does indeed lower kids' anxiety. So far, so good.
Now you must get the research published. You send it to a traditional journal. In the social sciences, about 70 percent of these journals are owned by one of the "big four" academic publishers: Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, or Taylor & Francis. The journal may charge you a fee for submitting (e.g., $75 or $140).
At the journal, an editor sends your work to several expert reviewers. The editor and reviewers are scientists like you, who receive no money from the journal. Once the editor accepts the paper, the journal might charge you another fee to cover the cost of printing (about $100-$250 per page) and for color figures ($150-$1,000 each).
Now the journal slaps a copyright on the paper, and charges people money to read it. Big universities spend millions of dollars per year on journal subscriptions—a cost ultimately borne by their students. But researchers and students at other institutions face a per-paper charge of $20-$50. Are you a clinical psychologist, doctor, or teacher who wants to keep up with the science in your area? That’ll be $50. Does someone in your family have a rare disease that you want to learn about? Still $50. It doesn’t matter if the paper was published last week or 40 years ago: $50.
Take a minute to consider the economics here. The researcher who did the work was funded by tuition dollars (in the form of a university salary) and by tax dollars in the form of the NSF grant. The editor and reviewers were also paid by their universities. The journal paid no one a cent. Now the journal gets to put the paper on their website and watch the money roll in. Michael Eisen, founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), compares this to an obstetrician who, upon delivering your baby, claims ownership of it and leases it back to you for a high annual fee.
You may be wondering why scientists continue to go along with this obviously exploitative system. The answer is that they are scared. In order to get and keep a job in science, one must publish research in 'high-impact' journals, many of which are owned by the big four publishers. "Impact" is a measure of how often a journal's articles are cited. Impact factors started out as a tool for librarians but they have evolved, stupidly, into a measure of prestige.
I say "stupidly" for two reasons: First, the internet makes it easy to track the citations for each individual paper. So who cares about the journal average? Second, there is no correlation between a journal's impact factor and the reliability of the science published in it. In fact, high-impact journals are forced to retract more of their papers than other journals. The idea that a journal's impact factor tells us anything about the quality of a particular article published in that journal is simply false. But old habits die hard, and today's scholars still feel pressure to publish in journals with high impact factors, which forces them to do business with the big four.
And the publishers do provide a small service by helping authors to preserve their work and present it in a professional way. The problem is that they charge exorbitantly for this service, which can actually be done quite inexpensively, as evidenced by the growing number of high-quality, open-access, online journals that charge authors nothing, take no advertising and operate at minimal cost using open-source software.
So the scientific community is getting fed up. Earlier this year, Germany and Sweden walked away from Elsevier rather than keep paying the absurd subscription prices. In solidarity, 41 professors from all over Germany resigned from editorships at Elsevier journals. Groups in the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, the U.K., Peru, Taiwan and my own University of California are demanding change.
Belgium recently amended its copyright law to allow researchers to share their work freely starting a year after publication, no matter what the publishing contract says. More than 17,200 individual researchers have joined a boycott of Elsevier, and the editorial boards of 26 different journals have resigned en masse and re-opened, independent of the publishers, as non-commercial, open-access journals.
What would an ethical business model for Elsevier look like? I'm in favor of a transparent fee-for-service model. The publishers provide a modest service, and they should be paid a modest fee for it. In the deal the German consortium tried (and failed) to reach with Elsevier, universities would pay a one-time publication fee when a member of their faculty published a paper, and all the papers would be free to read, worldwide.
The publishers didn't go for it. Why would they? They're understandably happy with the way things are now. In a recent Twitter exchange, an Elsevier employee responded to criticism of the company by saying: “Yes, everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y'all keep wishing for that, I'll keep working on producing the best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.” But that’s just it: Elsevier doesn’t produce knowledge— It sells access to knowledge that was delivered to its doorstep by volunteers. We need to stop volunteering.
As a parting thought, I will leave you with three suggestions. (For more ideas, see Chambers, 2017.)
- Readers: Never pay for a scientific paper. Search for free full-text papers using Google Scholar, Unpaywall, the Open Access Button, the pirate site Sci-Hub, or by tweeting #icanhazpdf. This is not like music piracy—remember, the journal didn't pay the authors a penny. If you can't find the full text of an article anywhere, just email the author and ask for it. Most will be delighted to send it to you.
- Researchers: Stop volunteering for these companies. Contribute your work as an author, reviewer or editor to high-quality, open-access journals that provide rigorous peer review, charge low or no author processing charges, and make the work free for everyone to read (e.g., Collabra: Psychology, Journal of Numerical Cognition, AERA Open, Glossa, Open Mind, International Review of Social Psychology, members of the Free Journal Network, and the journals hosted by PsychOpen and Scholarly Exchange, to name just a few). And no matter where you publish your work, post a preprint at PsyArxiv so people can get the full text for free.
- Employers and Funders: Stop using journal impact factors to evaluate individual papers or people. A journal's impact factor tells you nothing about the quality of an individual article. If you want to know how many times an article has been cited, use Google Scholar to count the citations for that article. Fetishizing 'prestigious' journals does nothing to advance science and keeps the parasites in business. It's time to follow the advice of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and stop using such metrics to evaluate researchers for hiring, promotion, funding, or any other purpose.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits, and that everyone has the right to share in the "moral and material interests" of any scientific product they author. The current publishing model violates both these principles. Like most scientists, I'm willing to give up my "material interest" in the knowledge I produce, as long as that knowledge is freely shared. What I'm not willing to do is watch publishers use that knowledge to extort billions of dollars per year from my students, my colleagues worldwide, and the public that already paid for the research. It's time for things to change.
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