Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful – Open Research at Bristol

"You find yourself on holiday in the strange and distant island of ‘El Seeveeyor’. As you walk through the narrow cobbled streets you chance upon a bustling market. At first glance all appears normal – farmers, traders and customers exchanging goods and gossiping about the humdrum of everyday life. But on closer inspection you notice something strange. The traders receive goods from the farmers, who in turn pass these over to customers; but both the farmers and customers ‘pay’ the traders for this service! “How could such a system exist?”, you think to yourself, “What do the farmers gain from this? And if the traders receive money from the farmers, why are the customers also paying? Is this an extortion racket?!”

We don’t need to travel to El Seeveeyor to witness this strange inversion in market logic – The same thing happens every day in academia. Researchers, funders and universities (‘farmers’, in the above scenario) – and ultimately the general public via taxes – pay for research to be conducted, while academic publishers (‘traders’) charge huge sums of money to both researchers to publish their research and readers (‘customers’) to access it..."