Jimmy Wales: charging to access publicly-funded research makes 'no sense'

“Wales has been consulted by the government to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in the UK available online. The initiative was announced last week by universities and science minister David Willetts. He will help the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the UK Research Councils to develop new ways to distribute research data and studies. Wales told Wired.co.uk in an interview: ‘Particularly in a time of austerity, it makes no sense to charge the public (through their taxes) to support research, and then to charge them again to read the very research that they paid for. The authors don't get paid, the reviewers don't get paid, and yet the traditional journals sell for a lot of money. A nice spot at the trough, if you can get it, but it's time for us to disrupt things.’ Wales was talking about major academic publishers including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley-Blackwell, which charge high subscription charges, which libraries and other publicly funded bodies are forced to buy in very large bundles for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As a result, the publishers have impressive profit margins -- Elsevier's was 36 percent (making £724m on revenues of £2bn in 2010). critical momentum has been growing and a protest called The Cost of Knowledge has emerged, with more than 11,000 researchers putting their name to a petition against Elsevier. They can pledge to refrain from doing editorial work for any of Elsevier's journals, from publishing their studies through the company or even refereeing any studies published through the company. Since the launch of the site, The Wellcome Trust has announced plans to withhold funding unless researchers make their publications freely available. Wales argues that an open access scheme such as the PLoS ONE model could be adopted in the UK. He says that he's happy for traditional journal publishers to compete in an open market with open access journals. ‘The competition will force prices down and they'll be forced to justify their existence to paying customers,’ he added. Open access journals tend to require the author to pay to have an article published once it has been peer reviewed. If the articles qualify, authors are asked to pay a fee of around £1000 to £3000. The fee goes towards coordinating the peer review process and managing the website. Wales believes that with the push towards making publicly funded research open access, traditional journal publishers will "probably" still have a sustainable business model, but "at a much reduced level of profits". Despite all of the talk about disrupting business models, Wales is most interested in how open access models could improve science. He says: ‘We now have the possibility for millions of people to read and learn from academic publications directly, through the web, allowing a much richer global conversation about knowledge...”