The academic publishing scam – how much research funding are we losing to journal subscriptions? | Infectious Thoughts
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-08-04
Summary:
Use the link to access additional data. "... If you are in Australia or New Zealand and want to know how much is spent just on purchasing subscriptions to academic journals then there is a very handy tool on the Council of Australian University Librarians website. In 2013 New Zealand’s universities spent $51,135,180 on journal subscriptions. That’s just our universities, so doesn’t include our CRI’s or independent research institutes. $51,135,180 to access work funded by the tax payer published in pay-walled journals that rely on unpaid labour by university academics for peer review and editorial duties ... To put that figure in perspective, the only funder of investigator-led blue-skies research in New Zealand, the Marsden Fund, awarded $59,000,000 in funding in 2013 – enough to fund 109 projects for 3 years. In other words, we spend almost as much on buying access to research as we spend on blue-skies research. I vote we scrap the subscriptions and use the money to double the Marsden Fund, giving each project an allocation to publish their results open access. Makes sense to me!"