Campus Morning Mail Brief: The Case for Open Access

"The crucial question in 2014 is who owns scholarly knowledge – universities and research institutions who create it or publishers who take possession of knowledge and sell it back to the creators ... Instead of this relatively open information commons we now have an expensive firewalled multinational publishing environment, almost “information feudalism”.  The profit margins of the major commercial STM publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley Blackwell andInforma, are in the order of 35%. Elsevier’s profit was £826 million in 2013.  In 2014, Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers, following his 'Cost of Knowledge' petition in 2012, used Freedom of Information to discover details of individual university subscriptions to the major STEM publishers.  He found 20 Russell Group university libraries in the UK now pay Elsevier alone nearly £16 million per annum, figures which resonate globally. Oxford University subsequently revealed it spends nearly £1 million a year withElsevier.  So how are these prices set?  The UK Research Libraries Consortium explains subscription prices are based on historical print models not evaluated de novo in the digital era. Replicating print formats for journals, rather than individual article and data access, is also an historical anomaly.  In their relationships with publishes individual researchers can be both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  When funded by an institution and/or the taxpayer an academic author gives away his or her research to a publisher, usually renouncing personal copyright in the process. The publisher then sells back the content to universities through their libraries in the subscription process.  As a reader, however, the researcher wants immediate free access to global research. Researchers are largely unaware of, or indifferent to, the costs of the scholarly communication process and are generally unsympathetic to the fact that most people outside of the university subscription firewalls are unable to access scholarly information and content ..."