Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research

We Can’t Trust the Market with Scientific Knowledge

submited by
Style Pass
2021-08-30 09:00:09

Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative.

The multi-billion dollar scientific publishing industry has long been a thorn in the side of the scientific community. Publicly funded knowledge in the form of research articles, produced by publicly funded workers, is then peer reviewed, for free, by other publicly funded workers, and then sent to the publisher for their meagre contribution to the scientific community: copy editing, standardised formatting, and hosting web servers. After this absurd process, which has mostly been provided for by public funds, the publishers slap on an extortionate paywall on the articles. The publisher rakes in 100 percent of the subscription fees, and access to what is meant to be a public good is restricted thanks to intellectual property laws.

This has the farcical consequence of universities collectively paying private companies to legally access the collective output of their own work. And while this isn’t much of an obstacle for rich universities in the Global North, it presents a greater issue for individual researchers or those affiliated to a university in the Global South. As India’s Breakthrough Science Society put it: ‘Without a subscription, a researcher has to pay between $30 and $50 to download each paper, which most individual Indian researchers cannot afford. Instead of facilitating the flow of research information, these companies are throttling it.’

Leave a Comment