“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” – Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder of Wikipedia
Imagine with me for a moment. What would a world of free access to knowledge look like?
I’d expect more innovation, more accountability, less waste, and less suffering.
Firstly, Europe and the United States account for about 14% of the world’s population, and yet these nations have almost solely contributed to the household names of science, including and far from limited to Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Albert Einstein.
Conversations with a friend from Uganda have made me shudder to think of impoverished regions’ several possible Einsteins that have not had the bandwidth to engage with science and mould it for the improvement of their communities. My friend is an entrepreneur and works hard to support his family, but he still has to ask me to share resources, since I’m privileged enough to travel beyond the paywalls. Such an inefficiency clearly inhibits people’s development.
There are a few firms that contribute to the paywall problem, and they’ve been able to do so thanks to an iron grip on the academic publishing market. Elsevier is the largest of the key players with an estimated 17.5% share of the global journal market, Springer Nature is second at about 13%, and John Wiley and Sons Inc. is third at about 9%.
At the time of writing, Nature, just one journal, costs $199 for a personal subscription for one year. $199 is about two months salary as a full-time security guard in Uganda.
Publishing costs for journals is estimated to be $3,500 to $4,000 per article, yet the typical profit margins for the academic publishing industry are 20 to 30 percent. In contrast, open access journals that only publish digital copies have an estimated cost as low as a few hundred dollars per article.
The absurdity of the time, dollars, and paper wasted by today’s academic publishing industry is more apparent when put concisely: scientists obtain grants and write manuscripts, hand over their findings to companies like Elsevier for free, and these companies sell access back to the universities the scientists work at for billions of taxpayer and student tuition dollars.
Why might scientists willingly publish behind paywalls?
“Publish or perish”
In the current system, scientists’ salaries substantially depend on grants, so they need to publish, preferably in prestigious journals, win grants, publish, win grants, publish… Should scientists not publish, they don’t win grants, don’t publish…
Jason Brennan’s book Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia stresses that an academic’s publication number and prestige of the journals he or she has appeared in are essentially the sole determinants of achieving a tenured professorship.
He suggests that PhD students reduce responsibilities outside writing publications as much as possible to have at least 3 publications under review at all times. That’s a prodigious number of publications for a PhD student and differs substantially from the suggestion I’ve come across on numerous occasions that I should shoot for ~3 publications throughout the course of my entire PhD (typically 5 years in duration).
Why is it that Brennan suggests a PhD student minimize teaching loads and volunteership in favor of spending most of his or her time writing manuscripts? Brennan pays attention to the numbers.
The average hire of an assistant professor of psychology at an R1 institution (primarily a research institution with a focus on doctoral education) spent 5 years beyond their PhD graduation date to accumulate an average of 16 publications. It’s wild to think 83% of these R1 hires needed a postdoc to ‘make it’, especially when the median salary for postdocs in the US (a job which requires a 4 year bachelor’s degree, possibly a 2 year master’s, and a ~5 year PhD degree) is $47,500 in 2019 while the median salary for a Kwik Trip Store Manager is $48,646 in 2021.
How might we build a better world?
- We need to align the incentive structure for scientists with human flourishing. The “publish or perish” moniker needs to go by the wayside, so scientists can focus less on the number of publications and the “impact factor” of the journal these publications live in and more on what’s important, innovation and understanding. Funding institutions such as foundations or universities might move toward salary-based compensation, so the franticness with which scientists publish bite-sized findings could decrease and consequently enable the development of more robust and reproducible research.
- Universities need to break ties with especially egregious price gougers in the academic publishing sector. The University of California — the United States’s largest public university system — has already cancelled its subscription with Dutch publishing giant Elsevier, a deal that cost a reported $10 million a year even though many of the journals included in the deal are seldom read. Furthermore, universities or grant funders could take the principled stance of not permitting submission of their researchers’ work to non-open access journals.
- We must support open access journals like Discrete Analysis or eLife with grants and tax funding, so their low-cost business models can persist. As a taxpayer, I’m much happier to know that my dollars are supporting work that’s accessible by myself and the general public. I’m not terribly comfortable with financially supporting the current powers of paywalled academic publishing with public university and research dollars. Once concern is that the quality of science might degrade because of less financial support for peer review, but scientists could agree to review 2 articles for every one they publish.
- Advocacy! Policy makers and funders ultimately set the rules of research. See Plan S, an initiative for Open Access publishing that requires that scientific publications funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms from 2021 for inspiration.
- There are already organizations pushing technologies meant to make science more transparent as an institution. One is Unpaywall: An open database of 20 million free scholarly articles, which provides a Chrome extension for finding free versions of articles that might be presented as requiring a subscription. Unpaywall even provides a tool for institutions considering cutting ties with expensive journal subscriptions. Another is the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework, a free, open source, and transparent project management tool for researchers to maintain accountability with collaborators and the public.
As always, I am no expert, but, as a common scientist, I ask questions and find answers.
Sincerely,
Ai
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