Integral Options Cafe: Why I Support Open Access Publishing - How Corporations Score Big Profits By Limiting Access To Publicly Funded Academic Research

"Recently I was doing some research through Google Scholar and found a couple of articles relevant to what I was searching for, only to discover that they were behind a paywall. Generally, the hard sciences are more easily available to the public (i.e., open access) while the social sciences are not.  To get these two articles would cost me nearly $100. In many cases, the article fee is for 24 hours only, so you are essentially renting the article for $30 to $60. This is only the consumer side of things. Authors pay to get their manuscripts published, and they often pay more--a lot more--if they want to allow open access to their work. The institutions where the authors are doing their research (universities, most times) then have to pay enormous subscription fees to have the journals in their libraries, and even if they opt for digital only, the costs continue to increase.  Here is an in-depth look at this issue from Think Progress ...  This major disconnect between how much of this research is funded and produced and who controls the final product has led to a flourishing Open Access movement with broad support among private and public academic institutions, focused on using technological innovations to democratize access to scholarly research and correct what they see as imbalances in the current system through reform on local and national levels. One such national reform they welcomed was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum outlining a plan to open up access to research to some federally funded research.  ThinkProgress’ coverage of that announcement drew criticism from an executive at Elsevier ... Elsevier’s website says the company 'will continue to identify access gaps, and work towards ensuring that everyone has access to quality scientific content anytime, anywhere.'  But their parent company’s lobbying disclosures in 2012 and members of the Open Access community suggest a very different position. When asked over email if they have seen Elsevier and many of the for-profit academic publishers actively cooperate with the Open Access movement on advancing public access to federally funded research, Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), balked at the suggestion ... According to the U.S. Senate Lobbying Database, Elsevier’s parent company Reed Elsevier spent $1,420,000 lobbying the U.S. government in 2012. Reed Elsevier’s in-house lobbying team disclosures and those from the Podesta Group listing Reed Elsevier as a client corroborate Wilson’s comments about their support for The Research Works Act — only withdrawingsupport after a boycott of from academic communities, according to news reports. That boycott continues today, and has attracted over 13,000 scholars and academics who object to Elsevier’s business practices.  Reed Elsevier lobbied OSTP on '[c]opyright issues related to scientific, technology, and medical publications' during the run up to the White House’s Open Access announcement and their in-house lobbying team reported working on '[i]ssues related to science, technical, medical and scholarly publications' and on 'all provisions' of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)–a proposal similar to the recently introduced Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) that would have required federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six mon