Visibility is currency in academia but it is scarcity in publishing. The push for open access shows that academic publishers can’t serve two masters

“It’s a common view amongst academics that publicly funded research has to be made publicly available. It isn’t necessary to condemn publishers but it is necessary to get them out of the way. The oddities of the market that allowed barrier-based publishers to cruise into this century are breaking down... It’s a truism among academics that until your work is published, it “doesn’t count”. The academic publishing system has been with us for hundreds of years, and changed very little throughout the 20th Century. It didn’t need to, because authors of research papers were so dependent on the publishers. On the whole, relations between authors and publishers were cordial and even warm. But that’s changing fast. The Internet has thrown the stable relationship into disarray as authors realise how little they now need most of the services that publishers provide. And because the traditional publishing model requires authors to hand all rights over to publishers without recompense, that realisation has been accompanied by a burgeoning sense of outrage, seen most obviously in a growing boycott of Elsevier (the largest commercial publisher) that has accumulated 8600 signatures in less than eight weeks. We have a network that can send infinite perfect copies all over the world instantaneously. For authors, it’s not just crazy when access is deliberately limited by paywalls – it’s immoral. Publishers’ reactions to the boycott have been varied: bafflement, sadness, defensiveness,condescension. ‘Within my company I see individuals who are genuinely committed to serving the scientific community’, protested Elsevier VP Liz Smith, somewhat plaintively, ‘Stop wasting time complaining about how evil we are...’ But the situation is beset by a fundamental paradox. ‘One of Elsevier’s primary missions is to work towards providing universal access’, proclaims a recent position statement. But you will find no mention whatsoever of access in the 900 words of the Chairman’s statement in the annual report, nor in the 1600 words of the Chief Executive Officer’s report. Both are entirely to do with financial performance. And that’s not surprising – or even, really, wrong. Because the simple fact of the matter is that Elsevier, like Springer, Wiley and the rest, is a for-profit corporation. And that means that their primary responsibility is to their shareholders. Directors are legally required to act in the interests of the corporation rather than those of customers or the broader academic world... When customers are served well, the corporation does well. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case with academic publishing. Customers fall into two categories: the authors who write papers and the people who read them. The interests of these two groups are aligned: authors want their work to be distributed freely, to be as widely read as possible, because in academia visibility is currency. So authors and readers both want open access. But traditional publishers are habituated to a revenue stream based on charging for access. It is a model based on scarcity. Scarcity was a very real problem twenty years ago, when each copy cost money to make and more to ship.. But now that the Internet has annihilated the problems of duplication and transmission, all that is left for subscription-based publishers is to create scarcity so that they can charge for resolving the problem that they cause. The business model now is to erect paywalls, then charge to lower them... And that is why talk of such publishers being ‘evil’ is really misplaced. They do what they do. It would be more accurate to call them ‘blind’ or ‘unthinking’. When they fight tooth and nail to prevent open access, they are no more being evil than a shark is when it attacks its prey; no more evil than a brick wall across a motorway. But here’s the thing. If a shark threatens people, then it has to be destroyed. A wall across a motorway has to be demolished. And publicly funded research has to be made publicly available. It isn’t necessary that we morally condemn a publisher that gets in the way of that self-evidently just goal. But it is necessary to get it out of the way. To demolish it, if it won’t move. And that is exactly what’s happening now. The oddities of the market that allowed the barrier-based publishers to cruise into the new century are breaking down. The monopoly effects of the top journals are less important than previously and becoming progressively less so. The rise of prestigious open-access journals is offering authors more choices. The 8600 researchers who have signed the boycott, together with an unknown number of others who have made the same decision without proclaiming it, are taking the motorway wall apart, brick by brick.”