In most industries, those who generate value are compensated for their work. But in some industries, it isn’t so straightforward. In academia, you freely give your work away for the prestige of being included in a journal. Publishers benefit from what the Deutsche Bank called a “bizarre… triple-pay” system where “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product.” Academic publishers exist solely as middlemen, leeching off the work of our brightest minds.
This model is supposedly justified because the publisher can offer certain services to the academic. Ostensibly, dissemination, but this has become decreasingly true as time goes on. Before, when published in a journal, your work would be included in a hard copy issue sent out to all subscribers to the journal — bundled next to the work of your peers and work in different subfields. This meant that anyone thumbing through their own issue or looking for an article in their library’s collection had the opportunity to spontaneously stumble upon your work. Nowadays, since most people no longer read physically printed journals, it’s much rarer that someone will find an article by chance as opposed to specific online search. This has made most new published works highly unlikely to be discovered by anyone outside that specific field of study. In the humanities, your odds of never being cited could be higher than 80%. So much for dissemination.
Plus, in the online world, publishers continue to limit the spread of information primarily through paywalls. According to the NIH, over 50% of published articles are paywalled, oftentimes as exorbitant prices. In an interview, Emily Gardiner, a reference librarian at Otis Library in Norwich, discussed how even though her library is well-funded for a town library, they’ve never seriously considered providing access to any major journals purely due to cost. The best they have to offer is access to a few minor databases and access to ResearchIT CT, a bundle of databases provided to state libraries through Conn. State Library.
So, it’s not as though there is a lack of interest in gaining access to this material, but that it’s simply out of reach for so many. Publishers are actively getting in the way of dissemination of academic work, their only alleged purpose. Academics don’t wake up every morning and say to themselves in the mirror: “All I truly hope for is that my work never sees the light of day.” Who does this system benefit?
The publisher is the only one. The publisher directly benefits from this limitation of access to academia. In fact, in an online world, their business model depends on it. We need publishers because they sit on so much work and act as arbiters of what is considered “worthy” research. Because we need publishers, though, they can charge outrageous subscription costs and charge $40 for access to individual articles. On top of this, they no longer need to print so many issues, reducing their overhead. They don’t need robust editing teams because of uncompensated peer reviewers. Even just getting attention for an article is left as a responsibility of the academic. This all comes together so that their profit margins can be almost 40%. That’s higher than Apple’s. The publisher provides no value, but this oligopoly extracts every bit of value it can. They are the landlords of intellectual property. The only way out of this system might be collective squatting.
There is a real push among academics for open access to their work. To allow free access to the articles and research they have produced so that their work gets cited and the public may access it. It’s funded with public money, why shouldn’t it be public? To accommodate these demands, publishers have crafted a new scheme: transformative agreements. Transformative agreements are contracts between publishers and institutions that combine subscription access with open access publishing, marketed as a step toward full open access. Some paywall models allow complete open access of published work, but charge article processing charges of thousands of dollars for publication in the journal. This allows you to keep copyright but perpetuates the idea that access to knowledge must always flow through the big publishers. This is not a real step towards sustainable alternatives to the major journals.
Real reform means tearing down the gatekeeping apparatus. The transition to open access should exclude them entirely, they’ve proven unwilling to cede their power in the slightest. Universities need to stop pouring millions into subscription contracts and instead fund scholar-run platforms. Tenure committees need to stop rewarding papers for sitting behind paywalls. Knowledge doesn’t need landlords. It’s past time to stop paying rent on our own ideas and take back the commons of human thought.