This week’s longread is not too long, actually, but it’s a nice exploration of a vexing topic, through the lens of a new tool that might help shift the dynamic in a very useful direction.
"What gets lost in the debates about the cost of publishing is the nuance around what publishing actually is and who publishers actually are. Publishing isn’t a specific practice by a certain kind of organisation, but instead reflects a multitude of practices, business models, formats, political modes, and so on. But this diversity is obscured by the fact that publishing is also a highly concentrated industry.
A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20bn academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians. When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1m extra in pay-per-view fees. But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000.
This week’s Big Deal Longread helps explain the connection between flawed science and Big Deal journal bundles. In “Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science,” the authors explain that the oligopoly of journal publishers and the artificial scarcity created by journal selectivity contribute to a system where the contest for highest “impact” will systematically undermine the accuracy of “winning” scientific articles. It’s a compact read, and well worth your time.
As 21 Nobel Prize award-winning scientists and scholars we are writing to express our strong support for immediate open access to the results of research funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars. We understand there is an Executive Order under consideration by your Administration that would remove the 12-month embargo currently in place for access to published, taxpayer-funded research and strongly urge you to sign this order.
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An article authored by a group of researchers takes learned societies to task for siding with for-profit publishers in opposition to a zero-embargo federal open access mandate. UVA professor Brian Nosek is a co-author. The piece observes, "What publishers provide today is not much more functional than paper, but it is much more expensive. They might as well be etching our research onto sheets of gold. The public suffers twice: First they are overcharged to read the results of science they themselves funded.
We the undersigned American scientists, publishers, funders, patient advocates, librarians and members of the public endorse a national policy that would ensure that Americans are no longer denied access to the results of research their tax dollars paid for. We have read recent media reports that the executive branch is considering a zero embargo taxpayer access policy, and we are writing to express our strong support for such a move.
Thousands of researchers have taken part in the largest ever survey into experiences of research culture. The results show it's time for change – everyone in the research community can help to reimagine research. Among the study's findings:
The system favours quantity over quality, and creativity is often stifled
For the last two decades, research institutions have been buying research the same way consumers have been buying television: in big bundles. And like big cable packages, these bundles have become bloated with content nobody wants, and their prices have exploded at rates only a monopolist could love.
The University of California system has struck new deals with the Association for Computing Machinery and Journal of Medical Internet Research, and is continuing negotiations with big publishers, including (informally) with Elsevier.