The Other Academic Freedom Movement

"In the summer of 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a researcher at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, set up an email system for about 200 string theorists to exchange papers they had written. The World Wide Web was a mere infant—it had been opened to the public on Aug. 6 of that year. The string theorists weren’t particularly interested in making their research widely available (outsiders would have a tough time following the conversation anyhow). Ginsparg’s archive was a way for the theorists to communicate with one another....By 1996, Ginsparg would write: “Many of us have long been aware that certain physics journals currently play NO role whatsoever for physicists. Their primary role seems to be to provide a revenue stream to publishers, a revenue stream invisibly siphoned from overhead on research contracts through library systems.” ...The Federal Research Public Access Act, reintroduced today by a bipartisan assortment of politicians, would broaden the open-access requirement [at the NIH] to nearly all federally funded research. The rationale is that taxpayers, having paid once for the research, shouldn’t have to pay again to read what was done. Today’s bill is a response to the Research Works Act, which was introduced in December. The Research Works Act would roll back NIH’s open-access policy and prohibit the government from imposing any similar policies in the future.... Elsevier [is] a multinational conglomerate that made $1.1 billion last year on $3.2 billion in revenue —a 36 percent profit margin. This is typical of the industry. It helps that the “referees” who peer-review journal articles perform the job for free. (Almost 5,000 scholars are now boycotting Elsevier in protest of price-gouging and other practices, in a movement started by a British mathematician on Jan. 21.) Erik Engstrom, Elsevier’s current CEO, made $3.2 million in 2010; his predecessor Ian Smith got more than $1.7 million as a parting gift when he left after eight months on the job...."