But the academic publisher who controls access to a particular paper or journal is a monopoly. They have no competitors. In some areas of research, there might be a similar paper that someone could reference instead, but mostly not — if I can’t get access to a particular paper, I can’t just swap out a similar one.

Uncontested and incontestable monopolies are naturally going to resist disruption. Consumers can’t vote with their feet, because there’s no place to walk to (unless you count piracy). We are left with government action from groups like the NIH or appeals to their better nature (and you need a LOT of better nature to offset a 36% profit margin).

It’s getting worse, not better, too. I’m noticing a lot more stuff behind the paywall that didn’t used to be. I am happy to see the issue get more press though — maybe we can speed up the rate of change, or at least make a dent in the ridculousness of the pricing models (see http://usablelearning.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/why-academic-publishing-is-destroying-civilization/ for a rant on *that* topic).

Thanks for the great article!

You are fighting a vicious cycle where authors need to publish in as high an impact factor journal as possible to both be promoted and to be funded. Thus new journals, regardless of medium, will always start with a low impact factor thus discouraging people from publishing there.

That’s definitely something we’ve seen and heard ad-nauseum from people that we’ve talked to over here at Scholastica. There’s an interesting post at the Conversation(http://bit.ly/qYMYlH) where publishers like Wiley and Elsevier enter the dialogue and justify why they exist and the value that they add.

Although, as we know, the value they add is small in comparison to what’s being added by those actually doing the research. Can you believe that there are even journal subscriptions that are close to 30k USD?(http://bit.ly/nAnfOv)

These companies should definitely be uncomfortable since the time is ripe for a disruptive technology.

The jury is still out on the viability of other disrupted information businesses because, in the end, you simply do not get professional quality anything without somehow paying a professional to create it.

Before all academic publishing goes open access, the open access folks are going to have to figure out a way to present their “eventual monetary value” in a convincing way to the creators they hope to attract. So far the free culture “just sell t-shirts” pitch has found only a small number of takers in the world outside the academy. The open access folks better come up with something more convincing.

From a marketing perspective, the pharmaceutical industry not only supports publication of papers in medical journals (consider the recent furor over industry-funded medical ghostwriters covered in the New York Times and PLoS Medicine) but then turns around to order reprints of the very journal articles they have already bought and paid for to help sell even more of their drugs.

Example: The New England Journal of Medicine sold 929,400 reprints of a single research article about the now-discredited painkiller Vioxx (most of these were sold to the drug’s manufacturer Merck). The company’s drug sales reps then distributed these reprints free to physicians as part of the Vioxx sales calls. Selling reprints of this one article brought in an additional $697,000 in revenue for the NEJM.

I think it’s important that we (as in, people within academia) not point the finger too much at one another. This problem hasn’t been caused only by junior faculty or senior faculty or by librarians or by administrators or by publishers, and nor will only of these groups be able to correct it. What matters at this point is that people within our industry – yes, I mean to call it that – need to become more aware of the cost and value of our work, and we must become active players, all of us, in the administration of our work. We often pursue our teaching and research for the common good, and often, this work is funded with public dollars; it’s time we start taking a closer look at how those dollars are spent (or taken advantage of) by others and raise our voices when objectionable practices occur.

As a librarian, it pains me to watch the research produced by my colleagues be ostensibly handed over to the big PublishingCo’s and then placed behind a moving paywall. Open Access will not solve everything, but it can be a big help, especially if we produce not only OA journals but also OA indexes. See Knowledge For All as a possible alternative to one big-name science index: http://www.k4all.ca/

n.b. for-profit publishers and vendors do play a large and vital role in academic knowledge dissemination; Elsevier should be commended for its decades of work publishing top-flight journals and content. The current model is not financially sustainable, though, and it must be reconsidered.

Michael Steeleworthy, MLIS.

But, another way to look at it is to see what an impressive job academic publishers have done at not being disrupted.

They have gone digital.

They have made it strengthen their businesses when it could have weakened it.

Why not praise them for that – rather than assume they have to be disrupted?

There are iniquities with Academic publishing – but they are nothing new.

The profit margins might be hefty. George Monbiot might not like them.

But it’s nice to know there’s one bit of the knowledge market that has the ability to invest and grow, isn’t it?

However, I think one of the biggest issues is something that has been mentioned by some people here, namely the peer-review process. In particular, the issue is how to attract the established and respected “old guard” to review articles in the “modern” open publications – that’s a direct conflict right there.

With this in mind, we have thought that it would be a good idea to allow everyone to participate in the review process in order to provide some wiki-similar value to the scientific community and so have come up with the idea of an open review portal http://www.papercritic.com – introduced in more detail in http://tinyurl.com/PaperCriticMendeleyAPI – who knows, maybe with time this will revolutionize academic publishing :)