OK – so my position is not that of a typical academic: I
work from home, a remote location on the edge of a wilderness area, and I’ve
never been able to make university library proxy mechanisms work for me.
Instead, I’ve done what I’ve always done: email authors for pdfs, or in more
recent years, google for on-line repositories. As a last resort, I’ll email our
university librarian. Never in my life have I paid the $30 usually encountered
with articles hosted by the big publishing houses. And yes, as of recently I am
editor of a pay-wall journal.
In the beginning, once upon a time, long long ago, I was
pretty much a fan of the idea of open access: after all, it intrinsically
appeals to the basic idea of what is right: that knowledge should be available
to all. Later on, an open access journal then published an article stating that
citation rates in open access journals were higher (shown later to be a controversial claim). In the meantime academics had 2 apparently good reasons to publish open
access.
But we need to take a step back from moralizing self-righteousness: in the publishing world, there are people that need to be paid and so there are 2 revenue streams: either the author pays (open-access), or the reader pays (pay-wall).
So a couple of years ago I braved the submission system of
Plos-One: the flag-ship of open access publishing. I was rather shocked towards
the end of the submission to find out that there was a submission charge of
$1500! That is right, one thousand five hundred US dollars. F me, that was more
than my meagre research budget! To be fair, there was an application process to
have this reduced (developing world submission etc etc), but after going
through that there was still a fee of $200 liable upon acceptance. I was
fretting about how to pay that for weeks, and I’ve never been so glad to get a
reject-and-resubmit decision in my life. After revision, that article was
subsequently accepted by a pay-wall publisher associated journal and I didn’t
have to pay a cent.
Clearly, for the likes of non-university academics like
myself, open access is just not a viable economic option. Ok – there are also
very few non-university academics.
But that is not the end of it. For years now, almost daily
somewhere in my spam box, occasionally filtering into my inbox, is a request
from a ‘new’ open access journal of SCIENCE NATURE or NATURE SCIENCE or some
combo of famous journal names begging for an article. Open access became a
business model quickly adopted by a range of fringe science organisations,
where profit clearly comes before quality.
And I’ll admit to having tested that out when an article
that I’d written, not in my field of expertise and of dubious usefulness that
had been rejected from reputable journal, was accepted pretty much as is for a
fee of US$50. The journal was south-east Asia based, editors clearly struggled
with English, and this was just one more article for their portfolio and a few
more bucks in their pockets. ‘Journals’
like that one thrive on the great pressure on researchers to publish-or-perish,
and reach their minimum, surprisingly difficult to achieve, quota of 2 first
authored papers a year.
The traditional news media world, e.g. newspapers, has been
under pressure for some time now due to ‘free’ news available on the internet.
However, with the rise of Fake News and click-bait leading us to advert filled
web-pages, certainly many people are now willing to pay for quality and trusted
content. I suspect that pay-wall
publishers are likely still around as they more or less are the guardians of
good quality content. Certainly, there is a legitimate reason to request money
to pay journalists and authors whose currency is words.
The big science publishing houses of course have a portfolio
of pay-wall as well as open-access journals. In a sneaky move by Wiley
recently, a submission by a student I’m supervising to a good–ranking pay-wall
journal was palmed off to a ‘sister’ open-access journal. When the crunch came
to discuss payment, the journal wouldn’t budge on their fee: around R15 000.
That is big money in conservation science. There was no choice but to withdraw
and resubmit, to a pay-wall journal of course.
And now with the rise of Sci-Hub, where pretty much any article anywhere anytime is available through their super-efficient search and delivery system, all the world’s science is basically now open access. So certainly, there is no longer the incentive to publish open access from the moral perspective of making your research available, except Sci-Hub is essentially peddling in stolen goods. Sci-Hub is certainly the Robin Hood of the publishing world at the moment.
I like that the logo for Sci-Hub is a bird (a crow?). In the spirit of Sci-Hub, I did not ask for permission to use this logo |
While open access journals cry their amazing download
statistics, lets face it: those of you who have accumulated vast pdf libraries,
how many of those articles were downloaded with you thinking ‘I’ll read that
later’ and you never did. Certainly, at a conservative estimate, I’ve never
read more than the abstract of >50% of my pdf library. And abstracts are
free anyway…
I’ll even go so far as to say that recently I’ve even felt
angry with fellow South African’s who have published open access. Maybe they
managed to get their fee reductions, but if not then not only are we exporting
our science to foreign journals (a tirade for another day), but we’re paying
for that privilege in a climate of #FeesMustFall! Certainly, there I must agree
that the money set aside for academics to publish open access could be better
used elsewhere (e.g. supporting the university libraries, student support etc).
So there we go: that is my voice against the ‘open access is
better’ hymn I hear so often. Viva pay-wall publishing! If you can pay for your
article, please do, and if you can’t: you know what to do.
Ps I was originally going to title this: “Does Sci-hub spell
the end of the open access publishing model?”, but that is apparently not an
original thought, should you care to google. But ironically, even sci-hub is
not ‘free’ – there (illegal) operation is all run on donations, you’ll have to
navigate their DONATE pop-up at some stage, and isn’t that really just a soft
pay-wall after all?