"How Corporations Score Big Profits By Limiting Access To Publicly Funded Academic Research"

[applegrove]

How Corporations Score Big Profits By Limiting Access To Publicly Funded Academic Research

By Andrea Peterson at Science Progress

http://scienceprogress.org/2013/03/how-corporations-score-big-profits-by-limiting-access-to-publicly-funded-academic-research/

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Here’s how the academic publishing industry works: Academics do research (frequently supported by public funds) and submit that research to journals, often paying “$600-$2,000 to either the publisher or the academic society that owns the journal” for the privilege of publication. Then journals send the research back out to other academics to be reviewed (typically pro-bono–a 2008 study estimated the worldwide worth of unpaid peer review was £1.9 billion a year), and the (often for-profit) journal publishers sell access to the published research, mostly to the academic institutions who do the majority of basic research.

The system is big business: The largest of the for profit academic publishers, Elsevier, reportedly earned over $1 billion in profits in 2011 with a profit margin around 35 percent and 71 percent of their revenue coming from academic customers like university libraries.

But the rapid inflation of journal subscription prices–the per subscription cost rose by 215% between 1986 and 2003–has left many of those universities struggling to keep up. In a statement last spring, the Harvard Faculty Council called rising costs to maintain access to scholarly works “untenable” and the University of California San Francisco Library spends 85 percent of their collection budget on journal subscriptions, but “[d]espite cancelling the print component of more than 100 journal subscriptions in 2012 to keep up with a budget reduction, [their] costs still increased by 3 percent.”

This major disconnect between how much of this research is funded and produced and who controls the final product has led to a flourishing Open Access movement with broad support among private and public academic institutions, focused on using technological innovations to democratize access to scholarly research and correct what they see as imbalances in the current system through reform on local and national levels. One such national reform they welcomed was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum outlining a plan to open up access to research to some federally funded research.

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[jsr]

1. If you don't like it, you're an ideologue

says the Elsevier executive.