The Australia Institute announces the nation “is funnelling as much as $1bn into the pockets of academic publishers ever year.” It proposes six ways to limit the largesse.
The institute, (“research that contributes to a more just, sustainable and peaceful society”), sets them out in a paper by Kristen Scicluna which warns, “academic publishing houses generate astounding profits through a business model that is contingent on public subsidies.”
Dr Scicluna sets out ways to “increase equitable access to the research funded by Australian tax-payers while preventing the misallocation of taxpayer funds to multinational publishing giants.”
While her paper presents nothing new to open access aficionados, it sets out the state of academic publishing and details the failure of the Australian research funding establishment here to address it, (with the honourable exception of the National Health and Medical Research Council) compared to the US and EU.
And she makes clear the journal industry business model, which socialises all the work and investment, while privatising the profits. Publishers do not pay the academic authors of journal articles based on generally publicly funded research nor the scholarly experts who peer review the work. But publishers charge for access to articles, either through journal subscription or increasingly slugging institutions fees for articles by their academics that are published open access.
Dr Scicluna proposes six ways to break publishers’ power
- funding by a lottery of eligible projects, to free researchers from the need to build a publication record in prestigious journals, “this undercuts the business model of traditional academic journals”
- include papers in open science publications in evaluations of researcher performance, to reduce reputational need to publish in established journals, thus reducing publishers’ pricing power
- a grant category only for research published OA
- more OA journals competing with subscription access journals. Dr Scicuna acknowledges the former still depend on article processing charges to fund publication
- publishing on pre-print servers, with voluntary peer review
- institutional repositories, archives of research by staff of an individual institution, wherever originally published
“The global momentum toward a free open access model is gaining traction,” she suggests.
Problem is, not much.
There are two problems with Dr Scicluna’s proposals.
One is that they all depend on more public money, or more volunteer labour, all of which are in short-supply.
The other is the set-in-stone standing of the existing publishing system. The present generation of senior researchers, grew up in a world where journal rankings make careers and there are correlations between where a paper is published and the worth of citations. It will take a decade, probably way more, until a majority of researchers do not care where a journal article appeared. For now, the journals that rate are generally expensive, either in what they cost to read or what they charge to run a yarn.
Ultimately the existing business model will evolve – in part because the US Government and the EU will restrict their payments to publish (both are already on to this) and the for-profit journal giants will adapt. What will also change is the way research information is packaged, not just in terms of platforms but processes. Social media will create way more options than a digital version of a static printed page. Plus, publishers are also diversifying into research data management, making on-demand new research products possible. Granted they will charge what the market will bear for such, but it will be cheaper than paying for a journal subscription or even one article, when what is wanted is a formula and evidence that it worked.
