Spread the word: scientists are tearing down publishers' walls

“Scientists just want to share – at least in one sense. When we believe we’ve discovered something new, we want to tell as many others as possible. We also want to provide all the information required to convince others we’re right. Yet most scientists' reports of their discoveries are not freely available... As do most of my colleagues, I provide free labour to the publishers (Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell among others) who defend this regressive system. So even though I’ve been posting my articles in freely-accessible web repositories, I’m still a part of the problem...In 2010, Elsevier reported profits had reached 36% of revenue... We’re mired in a system that wastes taxpayers' money and unnecessarily restricts the flow of new knowledge. We scientists would like our journals to be “open access” – ... But... A metric called “impact factor” is used as an indicator for the prestige of the journal that articles are published in, and used by administrators as a measure of the quality of our work. This is not a good way to assess research quality, yet here in Australia the government has unfortunately made it part of the Excellence in Research for Australia scheme for deciding how much to fund each university... In the past few months, boycotts of Elsevier and of the subscription model generally have begun... I created OpenAccessPledge, which was quickly followed by ResearchWithoutWalls and TheCostOfKnowledge... In 2007, the American National Institutes of Health began requiring articles produced by the researchers they fund to be available free of charge within 12 months of publication...In the UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK soon followed suit with their own open access mandates, and these policies have been very successful. Unfortunately, in Australia we are yet to see a single such mandate from the research councils (such as the Australian Research Council (ARC) or National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC))... Some universities, including the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), have leapt ahead and already require nearly all their research outputs be freely available... Older Australian universities such as Sydney have begun taking some steps forward but have not yet implemented anything as strong as the QUT policy. Mandating free access to their research outputs is a straightforward way for universities and governments to solve much of the problem, but we’ll also need university and government funds to help grow the digital repositories and other new models of publishing. The non-profit Public Library of Science, among others, uses an “author-pays” publishing system. The researchers who submit a manuscript are charged a fee to cover the costs associated with peer review and internet publishing...