In so many cases, the scientific literature that is peer-reviewed and published has been paid for by tax dollars. The researchers write grants to a litany of organizations, including the government, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The researchers receive the funding, the research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published. Then, the public in the past has had to pay an arm and a leg to get access to the information, that in many cases, they paid for. This is pathetic.
Obviously, companies such as Elsevier in the past has benefited far too much from this. This figure here is Elsevier’s logo and there is a banner within their figure which states “NON SOLUS”, meaning not alone – I would like to add “not alone in the parasitic sense”. This is interpreted as being the necessary tie between scholars and publishers. I completely agree that if the work of a scholar is not published, then it is meaningless for the world. While I believe that, I do not believe that the tie between a publisher and a scholar is to be a parasitic relationship either. They have sold countless articles to people in the public sector wanting to know information about a specific type of cancer that they might have been diagnosed with, or a loved one. This would apply to a plethora of other diagnoses as well. Elsevier in 2019 had a net revenue of $9.8 billion (U.S.). I do not have the data as to how much they make from people wanting primary literature and buying a single article for extravagant prices, but they make a ridiculous amount, especially when taxes paid for the research.
ResearchGate was sued by a number of publishers because of the increase in access to articles. People were uploading them and sharing them… Publishers were losing a lot of money and they decided to try to recoup some loss.
The desire to publish in an open access manner is exploding – for example, refer to this LINK, which entails the University of California’s movement towards open access publishing. The University of California is huge! It is actually a system of universities and currently has around 280,000 students. A big thank you to the University of California system. Elsevier even had the audacity to send copyright threats to them!
In many cases, if a researcher would like to publish in an open access manner, they get charged a massive amount to do so making it worth it for the publisher to do so! Alternatively, the principal investigator of the research group may opt to publish in an open access journal. How many open access journals are touted on C.V.s? Not nearly enough. How many open access journals are stellar with amazing impact factors that help the principal investigators obtain tenure? Most investigators don’t particularly like publishing in such journals because of this tenure conundrum. They are judged by the quality of the journal. The situation is twisted. New types of “preprint” servers that are open access are becoming popular. For example, “bioRxiv.org” allows you to publish, without going through the peer-review process. You even get a DOI assigned to the article which is useful to the researchers when applying for grants… It allows a way to showcase the state of the project. Anyone can read these.
If tax dollars were used to support the research being published, the publisher is obligated to make the article accessible – at no charge – to the public. This was not pushed by the White House until about 2013. It is quite shocking actually. Publishers have been taking advantage of taxpayer dollars for so many years and things are finally changing these past few years.
A fantastic and transparent addition that Google Scholar (Thank you!) has added in the very recent past is the “Public Access” section. It has the information regarding which of the articles listed are available and not available based on funding mandates. Furthermore, there is a “VIEW ALL” link that allows the readers to have direct links to the page to grab the PDFs! I love this transparency, Google! Nice job!
Also, during this pandemic, I very much appreciate that all COVID-19-related research is also mandated to be open access. That step was absolutely necessary.
Happy reading of primary scientific literature!