This is The State of Things. I'm Frank Stasio.
A lot of academic research was paid for with public funding,
but public access is often restricted by expensive paywalls.
Meanwhile, some academic publishing companies have higher
profit margins than companies like Walmart, Google, and Apple.
But there is a movement on the way that could turn the tide.
Paywall The Business of Scholarship
Universities are about educating humans,
and there is literally no reason to keep information from people.
There is nothing gained other than money, and power,
and things that, as people, we should want to push up against.
Lot of money?
A lot of money!
A lot of money. It's huge, huge business. Billions of dollars of business.
Academic publishing is a 25.2 billion dollar a year industry.
This journal by Elsevier, Biomaterials,
costs an average 10,702 dollars for yearly digital subscriptions.
Is that money well spent? It's hard to say.
In 1995, Forbes magazine predicted that scholarly research would be the Internet’s first victim.
Academics are progressive, and surely journals
would lose power in revenue with digital distribution.
23 years later, this couldn't be further from the truth.
I think one thing we learn when we look at history is
that humans are really bad at predicting the future.
And this is something that the media, they love to do,
and people who consume media love to read it. It's fun, it...
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The scholarly publishing industry makes about a 35 to 40 percent profit margin.
And different years when I've looked at this,
you know, Walmart is making around 3 %,
and Walmart is like this evil, you know, giant for a lot of people.
But it’s 3 percent compared to 35 percent.
I mean, I could have flipped my own attitudes now, like,
Walmart's not that bad compared to some of these
other players in other industries.
You know, wealth management industry is around 21 %, Toyota's around 12 %.
How is it okay for this whole industry to be making so much a profit margin
when there really aren’t any inputs that they have to pay for?
(Jason) What are the corporations which you compare
with that sort of a profit margin, that 32-35?
I have honestly never heard of corporations
that have profit margins that are that big.
In most other lines of, lines of normal enterprise and business,
that kind of profit margin is the sign of some kind of monopoly logic at work.
Even though people not in academia may not be reading a lot of these articles,
may not find them useful, they are still paying for them.
Your tax dollars go towards governments who then subsidize universities,
who then provide funds to libraries, who pay publishers through subscription fees.
The journals and the publishers are getting, um, your money.
Whether is it's you or your neighbor, everyone is paying into the system.
And the people benefiting the most are publishers.
Everybody deserves a profit margin.
But how can journals - journals! -
have a profit margin larger than some of the biggest tech companies?
Well, publishing is so profitable because the workers don’t get paid.
I mean, in what other industry, I can think of none,
in which the primary workers,
in this case, the authors, reviewers, get paid nothing?
Profit margins in many respects in the publishing are second to none,
and a few years back, I compared them to Facebook, and I realized they're about
the equivalent of the most successful software companies today in terms of margins.
And of course, Facebook has virtually infinite scale
and there's arguably no more successful company in the last five or ten years.
So, um, publishing is obscenely profitable
and because of it, the publisher’s in no rush to see the world change.
There is a real question as to why the margins are so high,
like, 35 percent higher than Google’s margins; what’s going on there?
Well, and that is simply because the pricing power, you know.
You, if you are Elsevier, let’s say, you have proprietary access;
you are selling a stream of content to a university.
And it’s not like, you know, going to the supermarket
and if there, you know, one beer is too expensive, you choose another one.
It is not like a university librarian can say,
"Well, the Elsevier papers are too expensive, we’ll just go with Wiley this year."
You kind of need all of them.
And so you have an ability to charge really as much as you want,
and the universities will rarely actually balk.
They might pretend to balk, but the reality is that faculty have to have access,
and that’s a very powerful position for the businesses.
Here's a problem in the market.
The market exhibits what someone has called a moral hazard,
which doesn’t have anything to with morality, [it's] an economic term.
Moral hazard comes about when the purchasers of the good
are not the consumers of the good.
So what is the good here, in the traditional publishing market?
It's access, you know, readership access.
The consumers are people like me who want to read the articles,
the purchasers, though, are not me, I don’t tend to subscribe to journals.
The Harvard Library spends huge amounts of money subscribing to a huge range of journals.
So, I am price insensitive to these journals, 'cause I don’t have to pay the bill.
The money is real. Right?
Academic publishing for journals is a 10 billion dollar
a year revenue producing industry.
This is not chump change. This is a significant amount of money.
When you think about a profit margin of 30 to 40 percent taken out of that,
that could be put back into the research enterprise,
whether it's supporting more science,
whether it's supporting universities,
you know, hiring more researchers, paying more faculty,
making college more affordable,
that financial aspect is a symptom of
just how out of alignment this commercial model is
in trying to stay relevant in the research process.
Usually we don’t think about the relationship
between the profit of such companies, on the one hand,
and the ever-increasing tuition fees at universities,
but it's also a part of the story.
We are not talking about a marginal problem.
We are not talking about the internal issues of the scholars.
We are talking about very basic social problems.
What will be the future of our societies?
Journal prices have been increasing way above the level of inflation
and well above the rate of the growth of library budgets.
Not just for years, but for decades.
And it's been a catastrophe.
Just ten hours ago, Anthem College shut down.
Saint Joseph College will be closing its doors.
Deep in debt, Dowling College is shutting its doors.
The abrupt closure leaves faculty without jobs
and thousands of students scrambling to find another school.
The academy writ large has not really examined
the full cost of scholarly communication.
It’s been really the libraries' budgets that have born the brunt of that,
and we have often had to go hat in hand to the administration
to get increases for serials,
specifically science, technology, medicine journals,
that have just had a rapid increase in price
for whatever reasons the publishers may claim for that.
And for profit to go up, scarcity has to prevail.
Welcome to the world of paywalls blocking research.
- Have you hit paywalls? - Absolutely.
I have definitely hit a paywall.
I hit a paywall frequently.
- Have you ever hit a paywall? - Oh, pff, yes.
I hit a paywall.
Quite often, I’ll find a paywall, yes.
When I was a student, I definitely hit a paywall.
I hit paywalls a lot.
- How do you feel? - I feel really pissed.
Students graduate, get their Master's,
flow into those spin-off companies,
and suddenly they discovered,
that they could not get access to the research results
that they needed because they were not longer affiliated with the university.
They came knocking on my door. And I had to tell them, that, as a librarian,
I was in this awkward position, that I had to block non-affiliated users
for access to publicly funded research.
And that is completely contrary to the mission of a library and a librarian.
So that was an eye opener.
Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?
I'm Dwight Parker,
I'm in the middle of my working on a PhD in Ed Psychology,
I decided that I needed to take a break from that,
and I’m selling cars.
While I was in the program, I had access to lots of things,
but once you're outside that program,
if you, those same resources just aren’t available to you;
at least they weren't to me, anyway.
In, you know, education psychology was mine,
and most of the research done is government funded,
so that's taxpayer money going to fund research,
that they're then charging for, which is absurd.
- I mean, it’s absurd. - Absolutely.
Not to mention it is a public good.
I mean, certain academic research.
I need to be able to access that research regardless.
I mean, I don’t have $79.99 or...to do that.
Not selling cars.
Even the coolest car in existence.
If I worked for Elsevier, I could afford it.
Yeah, or any one of those. I mean, it's such a…
Anyway. You know. You guys are doing it, you know, it's so…
the money just corrupts everything, you know?
You've got the money, you've got the government, and everybody's all...
and it is like the science gets lost. Honestly, it gets lost.
My wife had a pulmonary embolism.
And they're not sure why.
And nobody is still sure why she had a pulmonary embolism.
It could be a number of different things, and so I started doing the thing I do,
which is get on the Internet and start doing research.
And you hit all these medical research paywalls
where people are doing these studies about PE,
and I can’t afford to spend the money to read a research paper
only to discover that it’s not relevant to her. Relevant to our situation.
It might be. It might not be.
But there's not enough information in front of it for me to tell!
But it could save her life!
The reason that we have research is we're trying to solve
problems in the world. We're trying to cure diseases,
we're trying to figure out clean water,
we're trying to figure out how to take poverty to zero.
We're trying to completely wipe out particular disease states once and for all.
And, if you want to do that, we've got to make sure that everybody has access.
Not just rich countries, not just people who have Ph.D.s,
but everybody gets to read scientific research,
think about it, and then contribute their ideas.
And when large portions of the population don’t have access to research,
the odds of us solving big problems are significantly lower.
The publishers have been part of curating the scholarly dialogue
for centuries. And, in that respect, they are vital.
At the same time, we have a global population, that the vast majority
does not have access to research about current developments
in science, medicine, culture, technology, environmental science.
And are faced with the prospect of trying to make sense of the world without access
to the best knowledge about it. And, in some sense, that is tragic.
Western universities have really great funds for their libraries,
so, they are in the...
they have the capacity to purchase the journals, give access to their students.
But, in context of developing countries, libraries are really poor.
So, you eventually end up doing everything on your own without any support
from the university or college.
And even if you're trying to approach your faculties or professors,
you get the same answers, that "we did it the same way,
and you’ll have to do it the same way as well."
So, it just keeps going, and we don’t get a concrete result out of it.
So, my research was more in very fundamental physics.
Special relativity, there.
And many of these papers, again, was
"you'll have to pay for it."
I would say I’d never pay it for any paper,
especially in the economy of Venezuela, right now, it's even worse, unfortunately.
But even when I was a student there, you just kind of
take your credit card and buy something from the Internet.
So, from the lack of access, a movement has sprung out.
And that movement is called Open Access.
In its simplest form, Open Access is,
you know, free and unencumbered access to, um, information.
Very simply, it's a way to democratize information.
it’s to reduce disparity and to promote equality.
There’s lots of academics out there who can build on top of the research
that’s gone before if they have access to all of the research.
You might have some of the greatest minds of our generation
living out in Central African Republic who don’t have access to any of the content.
So, what they can build on top of this; how can they help move things further faster?
And I think that is what Open Access is all about.
It's allowing people who want access to the knowledge
to have access to the knowledge and take it further.
I think being passionate about Open Access is great.
Where I get concerned is
when somebody’s passion for Open Access
leads them to be unwilling to think about the costs of it,
as well as the benefits of it.
I get concerned when Open Access becomes a religion
or when it becomes a halo,
that requires you to love whatever it's placed over.
If we lose our ability, or, worse, our willingness to think critically,
to think as critically and analytically about an Open Access model
as we do about a toll access model, then we are no longer operating
in the realm of reason and science; we're now operating in the realm of religion.
And, I'm a religious person myself, I've got nothing against religion,
but it's important not to confuse it with science.
I can see how, especially if you’re on the other side,
it would appear religious. There is a lot of belief for sure, right?
It is a belief-based movement for a lot of people.
But a lot of the most powerful pieces of the movement come from the biomedical literature.
From parents who can’t access it, right? From family members who can’t access it.
And those take on the element of witness and testimony that is religious,
at least in overtone, right?
And there's real power in witness and testimony, that is part of evangelical movements.
And we can have a nerdy conversation about innovation,
or I can give you an emotional story; which one goes more viral?
Movements need to take all kinds, right? Movements are bigger than organizations;
they're bigger than people when they work, right?
That's kind of why they work: they take on this rolling avalanche aspect.
For me, why I am doing this is because of the
benefits to research efficiency.
I want to see increased research efficiency overall.
That is my overall goal.
If you said, closed science was the way to do that, I would be supporting closed science.
But that research efficiency comes with increases in quality,
increases in inclusivity, increases in diversity, increases in innovation.
Just having more people that can do something is a benefit.
We have big problems to solve.
I was very much involved, deeply involved
in the early days of Open Access in life sciences.
And our hope was that Open Access would not only bring the very significant change
in access; it seemed completely crazy that most of research is not available
to most of the people who need it.
I had a visit to the University of Belgrade a few years ago,
and I was meeting with grad students before my lecture,
and we were going around the room
talking about what each researcher did,
were working on for their thesis.
And almost everyone in the room was working on implicit cognition.
And it was amazing that there were so many students
working on this particular area of research, and so I said,
"Why are all of you doing this? How has that become this be the area that's so popular?"
And the immediate response was, well, "We can access the literature in this area."
"What do you mean?" I said.
"Well, there is a norm of all the leading researchers in your field,
all of you put your papers online. So, we can find them.
And we can know what’s going on right now in this literature
that we can’t get access to in other subdisciplines."
I was blown away by that, right?
That they made some decisions about what to study based on what they could access.
When I was directing the Library
and we had made major cuts in our subscriptions
because of budgetary constraints, same sort of thing that libraries do,
and we did a series of focus groups to try to see how people were coping with that.
And one of the people who really stood out to me was a young M.D. Ph.D. student
when he talked to his advisor. And the advisor said:
"These are interesting areas. Read widely in these areas."
And he said, "So, I have to read widely, but I realize my ability to read widely
is constrained by what you have access to.
And so my dissertation topic is going to be constrained by what you are able to afford,
because I can't get at and read this other material that you no longer have access to."
Some of the world’s greatest challenges
are not going to be solved
by one individual group of researchers.
And we know that interdisciplinary research and collaboration
is the way to get to those solutions faster.
And because so many of those challenges are so prevalent
- clean water, food security, global warming, public health -
there's so many challenges that need to be solved
that there's no reason why we wouldn’t want to do everything we can
to drive that collaboration and to enable it to happen.
Medical knowledge and incredible expertise can be found in every far corner of the world;
we just haven’t tapped into it too often.
So, um, a friend of mine is a pediatric heart surgeon at Stanford.
He would observe when he was visiting India,
and went to an institution that has now treated 10 times
as many patients as him, and they're able to get
almost as good results as he gets in Stanford,
and they can do this between 5 and 10 percent the cost.
And, to me, that’s genius! That is genius!
And, you would think that we in the Western world would want to
understand what's going on in India as much as they would want to see
what we're able to do with all our marvels of technology.
It is an easy conclusion to draw that scholarship must be open
in order for scholarship to happen.
And so it’s sort of a curiosity that it isn't already open.
But that's really because of the history of how we got here.
Every since the scholarly journal was founded or created in the mid-17th century,
authors have written for them without pay,
and they've written for impact, not for money.
To better understand the research process, we traveled to where research journals originated:
The Royal Society of London.
I am Stuart Taylor, I am the publishing director here at the Royal Society.
The Royal Society is Britain’s national academy of science.
It was founded in 1660 as a society of the early scientists,
such as Robert Hook and Christopher Wren.
A few years after that, in 1665, Henry Oldenburg here,
who's the first secretary of the society, launched the world’s first science journal
called Philosophical Transactions.
And that was the first time that the scientific achievements and discoveries
of early scientists was formally recorded.
And that journal has essentially set the model
for what we now know today of science journals.
Embodying the four principles of archival, registration, dissemination and verification.
So that means having your discovery associated with your name and a particular date,
having it verified by review by your peers, having it disseminated to other scientists,
and also having it archived for the future.
As soon as there were digital networks, scholars begin sharing scholarship on them.
Ever since, let’s say the early nineties,
academics have been seriously promoting Οpen Αccess.
Not just using the network to distribute scholarship and research,
but promoting it and trying to foster it for others.
It may sound like I'm making this up, but
I really felt at the time and I was not alone,
that if you have some wonderful idea
or you make some breakthrough, you like to think it’s because
you had some inspiration or you worked harder than anyone else,
but you don’t like to think it was because you had privileged access to information.
And so, you know, part of my intent in 1991 was just to level the playing field,
that is, give everybody access to the same information at the same time,
and not have these, you know, disparities in access.
Forty percent of all the papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine
- and then the New England Journal of Medicine is arguably
the most impactful journal in the world -
but 40 percent of the authors came from a 150-mile radius of Boston,
which is where the New England Journal of Medicine is headquartered.
Publishing is really an insiders’ game.
Those of us who are insiders have much greater access to publishing and also even reading,
as we come from the richer of the institutions.
A lot of people are suffering as a result
of the current system in academia.
We have a lot of doctors who would benefit from having the latest information
about what the best care to give to their patients.
There is so much research that has been done already.
It's ridiculous sometimes when we try to access a paper that was written in 1975.
And it's still behind a paywall. It doesn’t make any sense.
Research journals have come a long way since 1665.
We now have the ability to reach many around the globe, simultaneously
for next to nothing, and that is a huge benefit for scholars.
Many authors think that if they publish in a conventional journal,
especially an important conventional journal, a high-prestige, a high-impact,
high-quality conventional journal, they're reaching everybody
who cares about their work. That's false.
They're reaching everybody who is lucky enough to work in an institution
that's wealthy enough to subscribe to that journal.
And even if those journals are relative best-sellers or if they're must-have journals
that all libraries try to subscribe to, there are still libraries that cannot subscribe to them.
And many libraries have long since canceled their must-have journals
just because they don’t have the money.
So, authors get the benefit of a wider audience,
and by getting a wider audience they get the benefit of greater impact,
because you cannot impact in your work, your work cannot be built upon,
or cited or taken up or used, unless people know what it is.
And most scholars write for impact.
Part of what academics do is study questions,
try to figure out some insight about what they've learned about a phenomenon
and then share that with others so then those others can then say,
"Ah, what about this, what about that, are you sure?"
or "Oh yeah, let me use this in some new way."
So, really, scholarship is a conversation, and the only way to have a conversation
is to know what each other is saying and what the basis is for what they're saying.
And so openness is fundamental to scholarship doing what it’s supposed to do.
There's one of those original myths about Open Access.
There's no peer review, there's low quality, and so forth.
And we know that
when you put your stuff out in the open,
people notice, you know, if you BS your way out there,
you’ll be caught very quickly. If you miss something important,
in terms of a piece of evidence, someone will point you to it.
If you are not careful in your argument, or you miss a piece of important literature,
someone will tell you that. And so you, as a researcher,
would benefit from these observations and criticisms and other things,
so your research will be better, not lower quality as a result of it!
If you don’t work in this space, you don’t have any contacts,
you don’t have any concept of the, sort of, dramatic impact
that these tensions are going to have on everyone.
You know, when you see the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]
take down its climate change section of its website, there's real,
concrete impact to not having information be available.
There's plenty of free information out there, and we all know how problematic it can be.
Just because it's free doesn't make it good; just because it's paid for doesn't make it bad,
and I think that's the tension that this community’s always going to have to deal with.
Of course, in the very early days of the Open Access movement,
and Open Access journals, this notion that Open Access publishing is not of high quality
was very predominant, but that has changed now.
Open Access, to us,
does not at all denigrate the level of peer review, you know.
If anything, you know, it's going to be even better.
The reward system in many countries, in many developing countries
still mirrors our own, in the UK and the U.S.
We did a survey recently, asking about our researchers' perceptions
of Open Access, and lots of them, you know, were saying
"Great, Open Access is exactly what we need, we need
to tell the whole world about our research. Everyone needs access. This is great."
However, when we asked the researchers what their priorities were for journals,
where they wanted to publish their journals, the top things were impact factor,
indexing, and at the bottom of the list, was Open Access.
So whilst they were saying great things about Open Access,
unfortunately because of the reward structures, it's nearer the bottom,
because they still need to progress their career.
Open Access has been with us for some time.
The impact has not been as quick as I expected,
and I'm kind of worried that in the next 5 years, how fast are we going to move?
Is there a reason that research journals are so
lethargic to change?
Well, you might call them resilient [laughter].
I think there is a certain degree of lethargy. As you know,
academics are probably the most conservative people on the planet.
You know, yes, they may be innovating with their research,
but academic structures are very slow to change.
The academic community is very, very conservative.
It’s very hard to change, make significant system changes,
in the academic community. Our process for tenure now
is the same as it was 150 years ago.
Authors are very aware, that their chances of progress,
to continue their jobs, getting funding,
whole aspects of their careers depend on where they publish.
And this need created a sort of prison
in which authors cannot have an alternative way to publish
except to publish in those journals
that are most likely to help them in their careers.
One of the big obstacles for Open Access is actually
the current resource assessment and tenure and all these things.
Because there still is a tendency to say, okay,
if you publish four papers in the higher-rank journals,
you are producing better research.
It might be so that those papers will never be cited or never read.
But they take the journal impact factor as a proxy for quality.
And we know, all of us, that it is subject to gaming and fraud.
The impact factor is actually the average number of citations
that that journal gets over, it’s a 2-year window.
The impact factor is a perverse metric which has somehow become entrenched
in the evaluation system and the way researchers are assessed across the world.
You can charge for a Gucci handbag a hell of a lot more
that you can for one that you just pick off the high street.
Impact factors have perverted the whole system
of scholarly communications massively.
Even their founder, Eugene Garfield, said they should not be used in this way.
Then you must begin to wonder that, you know, there’s something wrong.
And the faux-scientific nature of them, you know,
the fact that they are accurate to three decimal places,
when they’re clearly not, they're given this pseudoscientific feel to them.
The Royal Society, a few years ago, signed something called
the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA for short,
which essentially calls on institutions and funders to assess scientists
in ways that don’t use the impact factor.
So going much more back to peer review, and actually looking at the work itself
rather than simply relying on a metric
which many people believe to be a very flawed metric.
But the way of addressing the problem is to
to start divorcing the assessment of an academic
from the journals in which they're publishing.
And if you are able to evaluate an academic based on the research
that they produce on their own, rather than where that research has been published,
I think you can then start to allow researchers to publish in, you know,
journals that provide better service, better access, lower cost, all these things.
Journals that are highly selective reject work that is perfectly publishable and perfectly good,
but they reject it because it's not a significant advance,
or it's not going to make the headlines, in the same way as a paper on disease or stem cells might.
So it gets rejected, and then goes to another journal,
goes through another round of peer review,
and you can go through this through several cycles.
And in fact the rationale of launching PLOS One was exactly to try and stop that,
rounds and rounds of wasted both scientists' time, reviewers' time, editors' time,
and ultimately, you know, at the expense of science and society.
The time it takes to go through the top-tier journals and to maybe not make it,
and then have to go to another journal,
locks up that particular bit of research in a time warp.
It is in the interest of research funders who are paying, you know,
millions or billions of dollars to fund research every year,
for that research to then be openly available.
There have been a lot of different ways to come at this,
and a lot of people have said, let’s be incremental,
first we’ll create what's called green Open Access,
where you'll just provide access to the content but no usage rights that are associated with that.
The Gates Foundation said, "That's only half a loaf,
we're not in the half a loaf business, if you're gonna do this, go all the way."
And I really applaud them for not wanting to take the middle step.
They have enough foresight and, frankly, leverage
to demand getting it right the first time around.
From the Foundation's prospective we were able to,
through our funding, work with our grantees to say,
"Yes, we are going to give you this money, and, yes, we want you to do
certain scientific and technical research, and yield a particular outcome,
but we want you to do it in a particular way."
And one of the ways that we want people to work is to ensure
that the results of what they do is broadly open and accessible.
And, along with that, we want to ensure that not only the money that we spend
directly on our investments and new science and technology
yield a tangible benefit to those people,
but we’d also like to see it to have a multiplier effect so that the information
and the results of what we funded gets out for broader use by the scientific community,
the academic community to build on and sort of accelerate
and expand the results that we are achieving.
- What comes to mind when you hear of Elsevier?
Oh my goodness. He-he.
Yes. Elsevier is a pain in the neck for us in Africa,
because their prices are too high for us,
they don’t want to come down.
You know, I think we can say that Elsevier is
actually a good contributor to the publishing community.
- Elsevier. What comes to mind?
Well, a level of profit that
I think is unfortunately unpalatable.
And unsupportable, because from a University's point of view,
of course, it’s all public funds.
Their licensing practices which have certainly evolved over time.
You know, if we look at Elsevier's reuse or commercial practices over the past 10 years,
I think they’ve made a lot of changes that have made them
more author or researcher-friendly.
So there is definitely an evolution there.
These publishers, whenever we publish something there,
this is financed by our departments. This is kind of public money.
So we are paying the money, but they are closing in.
I would never characterize them as a bad actor.
I think they do a lot of good for supporting innovation
and kind of cross-industry initiatives.
There is a lot of reasons why
people focus on Elsevier as kind of the bad guy.
Have a look at their annual report; it's all online.
their profits are up; their dividends are up; they’re doing very well;
they made a couple of billion pounds in profit last year.
By and large, does our industry treat researchers well?
Do we act effectively as a responsible midwife for these important
scholarly concepts or ideas and make them accessible to the world
and distribute them and reinvest in the community? I would say yes.
I personally think that Elsevier
comes in for a lot of bad press;
some of it is deserved and earned, I think.
I also think they have made a lot of smart innovations in publishing
that we have all learned from. I remember when I moved to UC Press,
I have moved from 20 years in commercial publishing
into the non-profit university press world, and it turned out that one of the main concerns
of some of the staff head was that I was gonna turn UC Press into Elsevier.
Which, of course, has not happened. But I... More seriously, I think
that those of us in a sort of non-profit publishing world can actually learn
a lot from big competitors.
I worked for Elsevier for a year, so I have to say a disclaimer;
I also worked for 15 years for non-profit scholarly societies.
And I was a journal publisher in both of those environments.
They're different environments. And, for me, my view of commercial publishers was shaped
by my experience coming out of the scholarly society.
I worked for the American Astronomical Society, where our core mission was
to get the science into the hands of the scientists
when they wanted it, the way they wanted it.
I went to a commercial publisher. I was recruited by them;
I thought I was gonna do more of the same. But that was really not the job.
The job was managing a set of journals to a specific profit margin.
And that just wasn’t my cup of tea, it didn’t mesh with the values that I have.
So I went back into not-for-profit publishing.
I do think it's not that they are bad entities, but their goal is
to return profits to their shareholders. They're not mission-driven organizations.
And that is fine; they're commercial companies.
My question is, right now, in the 21st century when we have these other mechanisms
that can enable the flow of science, are they helping or hurting?
And I would like to see them adjust their models to be
a little bit more helpful rather than harmful.
There are absolutely just criticisms that can be leveled at Elsevier.
There are just criticisms that can be leveled at PLOS.
There are just criticisms that can be leveled at anyone and anything.
I try not to judge the legitimacy of a criticism based on its target.
I try to judge the legitimacy of a criticism based on its content.
Oh yeah, good, I just wanted to make sure someone said this.
I need to talk about what kind of company Elsevier is.
The hostility that they sometimes get, it's not just about the money;
it's about the kind of company they are, right?
It's the actions they take often, they're anti-collegiate.
So, when they send take-down notices to academia.edu,
where academics had put up some pdfs of their research,
and then they were forced to take them down.
Obviously the lawsuit against Sci-Hub as well in 2015.
And, yes, both of those things were illegal, but the academic community doesn't care;
it doesn't really see them in that way.
When I got the take-down notice, I didn’t get
the take-down notice directly from Elsevier,
they sent it to an official at Princeton.
In the notice itself, it only mentions a handful of papers by two academics at Princeton.
Now, if you look at Princeton’s websites, there are probably hundreds if not thousands
of PDFs of published Elsevier papers.
So, why did they only target those small amount of papers and just those two researchers?
I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect it's because they were testing the waters.
Nothing is preventing Elsevier from doing a web crawl,
finding all the published PDFs, issuing massive take-down notices
to everybody who is violating their copyright agreement, but they don’t do that.
They do that, because I think they're trying to tread softly.
They don't want to create a wave of anger that will completely
remove the source of free labor that they depend on.
So, critically, as it happened, I was grateful to Princeton
for pushing back against them, and eventually they rescinded the take-down notice.
And so I think that they have a sort of taste of what it would mean
to really go up against the body of scientists as a whole.
The way that Elsevier thinks as an organization is just antithetical
to how I think a lot of academics think about what it is that they do.
We sent Freedom of Information requests to every University in the UK.
So, in 2016, Elsevier received 42 million pounds from UK Universities.
The next biggest publisher was Wiley; now it's at 19 million.
Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor and Francis, and Sage,
between them they take about half of the money, and the rest is spread out.
Elsevier in particular are a big lobbyist. In the European Union and in Washington as well.
They employ a lot of staff that are basically full-time lobbyists.
They have regular meetings with governments around the world
in order to get across their point of view.
There is some notion that publishers have
that publishing has to be very expensive and that publishing requires publicists
and copy editors, PR agents, managing editors, and so on.
So many academic institutions, to cope with the burdensome costs,
have elected to buy research journals in a big-deal format,
as opposed to specific journal titles.
Each institution, for the most part negotiates,
you know, with each publisher for access
to generally that publisher's entire corpus of research
or a large portion of it in what's called a big deal.
So, the subscription packages
which most libraries are involved in,
because we can save more money,
are definitely like cable subscriptions.
You get a lot of content; you may not like always like all the programming.
But if you wanna pay just for individuals titles,
the price goes up exponentially, and you can’t afford it.
So we're stuck in contracts with content that we may or may not need
to try to keep the price down.
However, they can remove content from the package without notice.
So, if a publisher decides that they don’t want a vendor to have
a certain piece of content in their package anymore, it can be removed immediately.
That does not mean that you can cancel the contract;
that just means that you no longer have access, and we have no control over that.
Although most institutional access to current research operates like cable subscriptions,
we found one library that has stood its tangible ground.
What we had to find was a reason for us to be valuable to the research community.
How could we add value to this proposition,
even though we cannot support
the rising cost of electronic publications?
And we realized that we could that
by remaining a print-based library.
- You can’t have a plug pulled on by tangible journals.
- No, we can’t. We can’t.
And if the power fails, you know, we still have access to content by flashlight.
You don't need a login or an institutional affiliation to use our library.
We are open to the public; even though we are privately funded, we are publicly available.
You don’t need a login; anybody can access it.
In the modern world, all the sudden, print-based seems pretty forward leaning.
Maybe half of our problem was getting roped into digital negotiations in the first place.
So, imagine a market for cable television where you don't know and you can't find out
what your next door neighbor is paying for the same package that you have.
- "How much are you paying for HBO?" - "I can't tell you,
I signed a non-disclosure with Comcast." Libraries, universities do that all the time.
Commercial publishers can capture all of what's called the consumer surplus.
They don't need to pick up a price point that maximizes their revenue
or profit across the entire market.
They can negotiate that price point with every single institution.
And that's important, right, because it's like, if you were buying healthcare
and the doctor could look at your financials, and be like, "Ah well, if you want this treatment,"
and, you know, they know you're a millionaire, "then it costs, you know, 500.000 dollars."
Whereas if you are somebody who does not have as much money,
they can charge less, but still make a good return.
I feel like, in many ways, that's sort of how the publishing market functions, right.
The publishers can look at the endowment, how wealthy an institution is,
how much they've paid over, you know, previous decades,
and then charge right up to the level that they think is possible.
There is lot of choice in here for libraries.
Libraries don't have to sign those contracts.
And public universities, like the University of Michigan have made
a point of being much more transparent about what we pay for things.
And the Big Ten Academic Alliance, of which we're a part,
does a lot of transparent work with each other.
So, I set off to test the Big Ten's transparency. Unfortunately, I was met with more of the same.
I always sympathize with the librarians who rail against Elsevier,
but my response always to them is "Cancel." You don’t cancel.
"We can't cancel." You can cancel, but you have to make that choice,
and nobody does, so they keep going strong.
Yeah, and I think that just, you know,
that's all the process of negotiation,
it is a traditional factor
of collections work in libraries,
and there is a lot of issues with that. But, it’s part of a negotiation type of thing.
And I don’t see that changing at all because...
- Could a university, like Rutgers, tell somebody what they paid for it?
- No, we wouldn't. No. - Because you’re contractually bound not to?
- Yeah, I mean, this is the way it works. So, again, this is not up to me to comment on
that particular aspect, but it is the way it works,
and it's the way it works with all publishers. Not the ones that you hear about.
But it's, you know, I don’t know what I could compare it to, but it's how it works,
so I don’t think there is going to be a change in that any time soon.
You know, I understand why a library wants to get a competitive advantage,
wants to demonstrate that they are getting an economic benefit,
getting a larger group of content.
And institutional libraries are very different from each other,
and some have to really demonstrate different sorts of value,
but it is a choice. Libraries don't have to sign confidentiality clauses.
It's often done in return for what looks like a competitive advantage
in the short term, but in the long term, it's not a competitive advantage.
It reduces price transparency and increases the risk of paying more,
as well as potentially paying less.
It's fractally secret, right? Everything’s a trade secret at every level.
How much this cost, who paid what, what the terms were. And that's on purpose.
It prevents collective bargaining, right? And all these things essentially maintain
a really radically unfair market.
There are some people who believe that there's enough money
right now in scholarly publishing that it just has to be moved around;
we don’t need to find more money. We just need to change the way it's in the system.
There has been a growing collective of journals that find it advantageous
to flip away from the for-profit paradigm.
So, in the case of Lingua/Glossa,
what happened is that that community
of researchers decided that it was enough and then
the editorial board all resigned. And then started another journal
on a non-for-profit platform, Open Access, et cetera.
There's not many cases of moves like that, but what this example shows is that
it can, indeed, work. So the entire community, or the leaders of that community
-because that's what basically an editorial board is- leaders of that community
decided to resign collectively; everyone on the board resigned
and then started a new journal with exactly the same focus and, in a way,
the exact same quality, because what gives the quality of a journal?
It's not the imprint of the publishers. It's actually the editorial chief
and the editorial board, who make all of the scientific decisions.
My name is Johan Rooryck,
I am a professor of French Linguistics
at Leiden University.
And I am also an editor of a journal.
First, I was for 16 years the editor of Lingua at Elsevier.
In 2015, we decided to leave Elsevier and to found an Open Access journal called Glossa,
basically just the Greek translation of the Latin name to show the continuity.
So, the organization of Lingua was, like, we had five editors total, so a small editorial team.
Four associate editors; me as the executive editor.
And then we had an editorial board of about 30 people.
I had prepared all of this two years ahead of time,
so, I mean, Elsevier knew nothing until we flipped.
So, for two years, between 2013-2015, I had already talked to a number of people
on the editorial board, but, of course, everything under the radar.
And I had already talked to all the members of my editorial team to say,
"Look, I am busy preparing this. If we do this, are you with me
or are you not with me, because I have to know.
And because or we all do this together, or we don't."
And so I all looked them in the eye, and they all said,
yes, if you manage to do this, we do it.
Elsevier's editorial body at Lingua shifting to the Open Access equivalent Glossa
set a precedent of how a successful and respected journal could change
its business model and yet maintain field-specific credibility,
quality peer-review, and overall impact.
We live in a culture that really prioritizes start-ups, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
And the reality is that, right now, there is literally one company that can innovate
on the scholarly literature, and that's Google.
And that's, Google's great; I use Google for everything like most people,
but I would kind of like it if there were a hundred companies competing for that.
I would kind of like it if non-profits could compete with them and try to
create alternatives that said, "You know what, maybe this shouldn't be a commercial product;
it should be a utility."
And that kind of competition isn't possible without Open Access.
That kind of competition is baked into Open Access.
And you see this from the large commercial publishers,
you see them understanding that this is actually an important argument.
They put like little drink straws in and dribble out little bits of content
that you can do text mining on. We can make cars that can drive.
You're telling me that we cannot process the literature better?
If a car can drive itself because of the computational powers we have available,
and there are more companies competing to make self-driving cars
then there are to process the biomedical literature
and help us decide what drug to take.
That is a direct consequence of a lock-up of the literature.
That is a fundamental fucking problem.
We started advocating in Congress for taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research outputs.
The most common response we got in our initial Office visits was,
"You mean the public doesn't already have access to this?"
Like, there was a disbelief among policymakers. That this was, to them,
the words 'no-brainer' comes to mind.
Researchers want their work to be read.
They want to advance discovery and innovation.
And while I spend a lot of time fighting over
why work should be open versus closed,
at the end, the real case is, do we want innovation, or do we not want innovation?
And I think there is an obvious case for openness to unlock innovation.
We're seeing a lot of very inventive resistance to this from some of the incumbent publishers.
But I think there's also a generational factor here.
I think the younger generation of scientists, of students, of academics,
just the old model doesn't make sense anymore.
The public should be ashamed for allowing a model like that to exist.
We have, today, a set of tools to share knowledge, including academic research,
in a way that we couldn't 20 years ago.
You know, I'm seeing in our engagement with the academic sector,
and by that, I'm referring specifically to our grantees,
so we make grants to academic institutions, and it's then the academics
that work there that do the work.
There's a much stronger appreciation for the role of Open Access to the results of their research.
You know, they see it as being something that is a benefit to them
to be able to have access to information, data, and so forth
that's being generated by others, and so there's much more comfort
with this notion of information and data being open and accessible.
I'm never sure of the right solution.
Actually, when I talk to publishers,I think,
"Can I do this? Or can't I do this?"
You know, there are so many questions about copyright;
there are so many questions about intellectual property;
there are so many questions about what individual authors can and can’t do
if they decide to go and publish with a particular journal.
It just feels like there's so many questions with each interaction.
One outlet that has streamlined scholarship is that of Sci-Hub,
which continues to connect individuals directly with the scholarship they need,
when they need it, for free.
You know, those of us who work in scholarly communications
writ large, right, really have to look at Sci-Hub
as a sort of a poke in the side that says,
"Do better."
We need to look to Sci-Hub and say, "What is it that we can be doing
differently about the infrastructure that we've developed
to distribute journal articles, to distribute scholarship?"
Because Sci-Hub cracked the code, right? And they did it fairly easily.
And I think that we need to look at what's happening with Sci-Hub,
how it evolved, who's using it, who's accessing it,
and let it be a lesson to us for what we should be doing differently.
People use websites like Sci-Hub, considered the pirate of academic publishing.
It's like the Napster of academic publishing.
I know that they've been in legal battles with Elsevier who shut them down,
they just open up in a different website. It's still up and running and more popular than ever.
So, if I had to give advice to graduate students, or people not affiliated with institutions
that provide access to a lot of these journals, Sci-Hub is a great resource,
it provides it for free. A lot of people don’t feel guilty about using these resources
just like when Napster came out, because the industry at present is making too much
off of the people who are giving of themselves and doing great research,
and they're being taken advantage of. So, to take advantage of publishers
and get articles for free that are actually being used to educate or to develop things
that are used for the public good, it's a trade off that a lot of people
are willing to make.
And I am not completely against it.
You know, I like those acts of what I would consider civil disobedience.
I think they're important. I think they're a moment when we can,
should have open discussion around them,
and I fear that the openness of the discussion is there's no nuance at all.
It is either, as we've heard, Sci-Hub equals evil. Like, it just has to.
Sci-hub basically is illegal. It is a totally criminal activity,
and why anybody thinks it’s appropriate to take somebody else’s intellectual property
and just steal it basically?
That bothers me.
It's not only about people who don’t have access.
It's even being used by people in institutions that have full access,
because it works in a very simple and efficient way.
What Sci-Hub shows is the level of frustration amongst many academics
about the number of times they encounter a paywall.
I just feel like we're in the middle, we're in this interstitial period,
and everyone wants it to be done as opposed to just saying,
"You know what? None of us really has a clue of what's going to happen
ιn the next 15-20 years."
All we know is that we're at the edge of falling off the cliff
that music fell off of with Napster. That's what Sci-Hub shows me.
Τhere would not be a demand for Sci-Hub if we had been successful
or if the publishing industry had been successful, right?
Arguably, what we did was to create the conditions, right, on both sides,
us and the publishing industry that led to this moment.
And, so, you know, now that you see the potential of a system
that lets you find any paper. I've been using Sci-hub to collect my dad's papers, right.
My dad died earlier this year, he was a Nobel laureate for his work on climate change.
I've tried to build an archive of all his papers so I could give it to my son, right.
Can't do it! Price would be in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Right. I'm not the only person who needs papers. I'm not the only person who's doing it this way.
I'm not trying to redistribute these things, right.
I am literally printing them out into a book. Then I’m gonna just staple it for my son, right?
So he knows his grand-dad, what his grand-dad did, because he won’t remember it.
That's a market failure. That’s a tremendous market failure.
Priorities are going to change.
And I believe that Elsevier is a business full of smart people, who want discovery to happen,
but don’t have a better idea on how to make money in the middle.
And, unfortunately for them, the internet is the story of breaking down gatekeepers.
They're the gatekeeper, standing between, in some cases, research and discovery.
If someone's research is behind a paywall, and it stops me from doing research
in that field in my lifetime, how many more lifetimes do we have to wait
for somebody else to be able to take that evolutionary step?
Sometimes, innovation is the right person in the right place at the right time,
and all a paywall does is ensure that it's a lot less likely that the right person
is going to be in the right place at the right time to get something done.
Transcript: Elena Milova, Joshua Conway, anonymous lifespan.io member
Synchronization: Giannis Tsakonas