Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research>
>
> Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free | George Monbiot
>
> Thu 13 Sep 2018
> Those who take on the global industry that traps research behind paywalls are heroes, not thieves
>
>
> Illustration: Eva Bee
> Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/carolecadwalladr>, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex,  
> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files>Alexandra Elbakyan 
> <https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit> has done 
> to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub <https://sci-hub.tw/>, her pirate 
> web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the 
> capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should 
> be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and 
> universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an 
> obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist> of any industry.
>
> The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be 
> informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can 
> establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science> “a 
> perpetual financing machine”. He also realised that he could capture other people’s labour and resources for nothing. 
> Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed 
> them and edited the journals for free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources. Or, 
> to use the technical term, daylight robbery.
>
> As his other ventures ran into trouble, he sold his company to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. Like its major 
> rivals, it has sustained the model to this day, and continues to make spectacular profits 
> <https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx2017-annual-report.pdf>. Half 
> the world’s research is published by five companies 
> <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502#pone.0127502.ref047>: Reed Elsevier, 
> Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and the American Chemical Society. Libraries must pay a fortune for their 
> bundled journals, while those outside the university system are asked to pay $20, $30, sometimes $50 to read a single 
> article.
>
> While open-access journals have grown rapidly <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05191-0>, researchers still 
> have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals. And, because their work is assessed by those who might 
> fund, reward or promote them according to the impact of the journals in which they publish, many feel they have no 
> choice but to surrender their research to these companies. Science ministers come and go without saying a word about 
> this rip-off.
>
>
> ‘Robert Maxwell called his discovery “a perpetual financing machine”.’ Photograph: Terry O'Neill/Hulton Archive/Getty 
> Images
> After my cancer diagnosis 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/13/prostate-cancer-happy-diagnosis-operation> this year, I was 
> offered a choice of treatments. I wanted to make an informed decision. This meant reading scientific papers. Had I 
> not used the stolen material provided by Sci-Hub, it would have cost me thousands. Because I, like most people, don’t 
> have this kind of money <https://www.monbiot.com/registry-of-interests/>, I would have given up before I was properly 
> informed. I have never met Elbakyan, and I can only speculate about alternative outcomes had the research I read not 
> swayed my decision. But it is possible that she has saved my life.
>
> Like people in many countries where scholarship is poorly funded, Elbakyan discovered that she could not complete her 
> neuroscience research without pirated articles. Outraged by the journals’ padlock on knowledge, she used her hacking 
> skills <http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6285/511> to share papers more widely. Sci-Hub allows free access 
> to 70m papers, otherwise locked behind paywalls.
>
> She was sued in 2015 by Elsevier, which won $15m in damages for copyright infringement 
> <https://www.nature.com/news/us-court-grants-elsevier-millions-in-damages-from-sci-hub-1.22196>, and in 2017 by the 
> American Chemical Society, resulting in a $4.8m fine 
> <https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/american-chemical-society-wins-lawsuit-against-sci-hub-30648>. These were 
> civil cases, concerning civil matters. While the US courts have characterised her activities as copyright violation 
> and data theft, to me her work involves the restoration to the public realm of property that belongs to us and for 
> which we have paid. In the great majority of cases, the research reported has been funded by taxpayers. Most of the 
> work involved in writing the papers, reviewing and editing them is carried out at public expense by people at 
> universities. Yet this public asset has been captured, packaged and sold back to us for phenomenal fees. Those who 
> pay most are publicly funded libraries. Taxpayers must shell out twice: first for the research, then to see the work 
> they have sponsored. There might be legal justifications for this practice. There are no ethical justifications.
>
> Alexandra Elbakyan lives in hiding 
> <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/meet-the-woman-who-put-50-million-stolen-articles-online-so-you-can-read-them-for-free-a6964176.html>,
>  beyond the jurisdiction of the US courts, and moves Sci-Hub between domains as it gets taken down. She is by no 
> means the only person to have challenged the big publishers. The Public Library of Science 
> <https://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/09/michael-eisen-plos-open-access-aaron-swartz/2/>, founded by researchers 
> who objected not only to the industry’s denial of public access but also its slow, antiquated and clumsy modes of 
> publishing <http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/08/7-functionalities-the-scholarly-literature-should-have/> that hold back 
> scientific research, has demonstrated that you don’t need paywalls to produce excellent journals. Advocates like 
> Stevan Harnad <https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/harnad>, Björn Brembs <http://brembs.net/>, Peter Suber 
> <https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/psuber> and Michael Eisen <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/> have changed the 
> public mood. The brilliant online innovator Aaron Swartz 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/07/aaron-swartz-suicide-internets-own-boy> sought to release 5m 
> scientific articles into the public domain. Facing the possibility of decades in a US federal prison for this 
> selfless act, he took his life 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/07/aaron-swartz-suicide-internets-own-boy>.
>
> Now libraries feel empowered to confront the big publishers. They can refuse to renew contracts with companies as 
> their users have another means of getting past the paywall. As the system has begun to creak, government funding 
> agencies have at last summoned the courage to do what they should have done decades ago, and demand the 
> democratisation of knowledge.
>
> Last week, a consortium of European funders, including major research agencies in the UK, France, the Netherlands and 
> Italy, published their “Plan S” <https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Plan_S.pdf>. It insists 
> that, from 2020, research we have already paid for through our taxes will no longer be locked up. Any researcher 
> receiving money from these funders must publish her or his work only in open-access journals.
>
> The publishers have gone ballistic. Springer Nature argues that  
> <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7>this plan “potentially undermines the whole research publishing 
> system”. Yes, that’s the point. The publishers of the Science series maintain that 
> <https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/open-access-plan-in-europe-bans-publishing-in-paywalled-journals-64748> 
> it would “disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom”. Elsevier 
> says, <https://twitter.com/msphelps/status/1036968284762066945> “If you think information shouldn’t cost anything, go 
> to Wikipedia”, inadvertently reminding us of what happened to the commercial encyclopedias.
>
> Plan S is not perfect <https://plus.google.com/+PeterSuber/posts/iGEFpdYY9dr>, but this should be the beginning of 
> the end of Maxwell’s outrageous legacy. In the meantime, as a matter of principle, do not pay a penny to read an 
> academic article. The ethical choice is to read the stolen material published by Sci-Hub.
>
> • George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
>
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>
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