Archive for Academic Journal Racket

On Scholarly Communication

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on June 9, 2025 by telescoper

My marking duties being over, it’s time once more to take up the cudgels against the academic publishing racket, at least in a small way, by sharing an article from the European University Association called Reclaiming academic ownership of the scholarly communication system. I recommend you read the entire piece, which is an extended briefing note. It can be downloaded as a PDF here. One of the points it makes very strongly is how much the Open Access movement has been hijacked by commercial publishers.

I will share a couple of sections with you here. First, some background information about Open Access Publishing:

Now I’ll cut to the chase and share the key points from the end.

  1. Accelerate the reform of research assessment. Most of the issues in the current publishing system are rooted in how academic staff are evaluated. Research assessment reform is essential to break the cycle of dependence on high-impact commercial journals and related metrics. Universities should consider broadening the criteria used in academic evaluation, to ensure that recognition goes beyond research to include teaching, innovation, leadership, open science practices, and societal outreach. While institutional, regulatory, and cultural factors can either facilitate or hinder reforms, many universities are already taking the initiative and implementing changes (even in countries with centrally regulated academic career assessment processes).
  2. Strengthen institutional publishing services and infrastructures. A robust, sustainable and interoperable scholarly publishing ecosystem requires each university to properly curate their research contributions and outputs, through institutional or shared infrastructure and services (e.g. repositories, publishing platforms, and CRIS systems). Strengthening these institutional capacities may require reallocating resources and cooperation (see points 3 and 4). This should also apply to the various institutional departments (libraries, research management, etc.) and staff needed to support academics and researchers.
  3. Cooperate and coordinate with other universities, research performing and funding organisations, as well as researchers’ associations and learned societies. The challenges of scholarly publishing are systemic, and no single institution can tackle them alone. Universities should align their efforts with other academic organisations, funders and research institutions. Cooperation and coordination can be valuable for advocacy, policy development and implementation, as well as for shared or “horizontal” services and infrastructures. Cooperation can also take place within regional, national, European and global frameworks.
  4. Critically evaluate expenditure on commercial research publishing and information products and services. As new not-for-profit publishing alternatives emerge and consolidate, universities should regularly evaluate their expenditure on commercial products and services, including journal publication costs and research databases. By promoting cost transparency and cost efficiency, institutions can make informed decisions that support innovation and reinvest funds into institutional publishing services and infrastructure (see point 2). Where feasible, preference should be given to not-for-profit solutions, ultimately reducing costs and ensuring sustainability.
  5. Support and promote the use of rights retention by the university community. Rights retention should be used to regain academic ownership of scholarly communication. Universities should actively advocate for legislative reforms that allow researchers to retain their rights and freely share their research. They should also educate and inform their faculty and researchers of the importance of rights retention and provide legal support. Where legally feasible, institutions should implement and enforce rights retention policies to ensure that publicly funded research remains publicly accessible.
  6. Ensure researcher engagement. Any transition toward a more equitable and sustainable scholarly communication system must involve the academic community. Universities should raise awareness of the systemic issues in scholarly publishing and create spaces for dialogue, reflection, and co-design to discuss how to address them at institutional level. Engaging researchers early and consistently can help shift perceptions, foster a sense of shared responsibility and build support for longterm cultural change.

I endorse all of these, and have written about some of them before (e.g. here) but I would add to the first that universities should actively lobby their governments to change research assessment methods which in many cases are causing an immense waste of public money by outsourcing research assessment to entities, such as Scopus, who are mere fronts for the academic publishing industry.

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Progress on Open Access?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on April 27, 2023 by telescoper

The current state of play with regard to Open Access publishing is very disappointing. The academic publishing industry seems to have persuaded the powers that be to allow them to charge exorbitant article processing charges (APCs) to replace revenues lost from subscriptions when they publish a paper free to readers. This simply transfers the cost from reader to author, and excludes those authors who can’t afford to pay.

This current system of ‘Gold’ Open Access is a scam, and it’s a terrible shame we have ended up having it foisted upon us. Fortunately, being forced to pay APCs of many thousands of euros to publish their papers, researchers are at last starting to realize that they are being ripped off. Recently, the entire Editorial Board of Neuroimage and its sister journal Neuroimage: Reports resigned in protest at the `extreme’ APC levels imposed by the publisher, Elsevier. I’m sure other academics will follow this example, as it becomes more and more obvious that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Previously the profits of the big publishers were hidden in library budgets. Now they are hitting researchers and their grants directly, as authors now have to pay, and people who previously hadn’t thought much about the absurdity of it all are now realizing what a racket academic publishing really is.

The people at the top have been slow to grasp this reality, but there are signs that this is at last happening, In the USA there has been the Nelson Memorandum (see discussion here). Now there is movement in the European Union, with member states apparently set on agreeing a  text to be published next month (May 2023) that calls for immediate open access the default, with no author fees. This is clearly how Open Access should be, though I am still worried that the sizeable publishing lobby will try to persuade research agencies and institutions to pay the existing fees on behalf of authors, which does not solve the problem but merely hides it.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. The replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC.

We are lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. Indeed, it is now a truth universally acknowledged* that every new research paper worth reading in these disciplines can be found on arXiv. Old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. A list of existing repositories can be found here. I’m sure many more will follow. What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

*It is also a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who doesn’t understand the reference to “a truth university acknowledged” has not read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen…

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Yet another side of the academic journal racket…

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on May 30, 2012 by telescoper

Another illustration of how the Academic Journal Racketeers (in this case one of the usual suspects, Elsevier) have a stranglehold on research. As well as levying huge subscription charges they also supply a service called SCOPUS which the panels in the Research Excellence Framework will use to inform their deliberations. Needless to say, SCOPUS itself is a subscription-only resource. The academic publishing industry is of course very keen on the Research Excellence Framework. It’s certainly an Excellent Framework when it comes to making money. Pity about the actual Research though.

Mike Taylor's avatarSauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Scopus bills itself as “the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources covering nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers.”

Sounds useful. But it’s useless. Literally.

Because it’s a subscription-only resource:

Now I am an associate researcher at the University of Bristol. UoB is part of the UK Access Management Federation, so I select that in the Shibboleth authentication page:

But the list of member universities doesn’t include Bristol, instead skipping straight from “University of Birmingham” to the intriguingly named “University of Bolton – Do Not Use”:

I can’t use it.

So it’s useless to me. Literally.

This is why it’s frustrating to me when I read statements like this from Elsevier’s Alicia Wise:

Commercial publishers are especially able to command resources to … develop new technologies and platforms to access journal content and improve researcher productivity (e.g., ScienceDirect, Scopus, Scirus, CrossRef, CrossCheck. Article of…

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The Academic Publishing Empire Strikes Back

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on May 25, 2012 by telescoper

There’s an article in this morning’s Grauniad in which a representative of the academic publishing industry, by the name of Graham Taylor,  tries to counter the vociferous criticism that has been aimed at this sector in recent months. Mr Taylor is right when he comments that most of the furore relates to the issue of Open Access, i.e. the fact that academic  articles are often hidden behind paywalls when published, even when the research on which they are based is funded by the taxpayer.

Mr Taylor actually claims that the publishing industry is all for open access. Perhaps this is true, but if that’s the case it’s because they’ve been forced to that point by pressure from external agencies.  The latest sign of this pressure is a petition in the US to force taxpayer-funded research out into the open. I’m sure academic publishers are smart enough to read the writing on the wall, so it has now become politic for them to pretend that the proposals for open access were what they wanted all along.

However, the main thrust of Mr Taylor’s argument is that we must ensure that any new model of academic publishing is “sustainable”. What he means by that is that he wants academic publishers to be able to sustain their healthy profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer.  I disagree with his arguments in almost every respect, so much so that it actually made me rather angry to read the piece.

Here’s an example

The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing scripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating journals; and of course archiving.

This description bears very little relation to what happens in my field. Journals do not “solicit” manuscripts – they just wait for submissions to arrive. “Managing peer review” merely involves farming the job out to unpaid external referees. “Editing and preparing scripts”? All journals I deal with require authors to typeset and copy-edit their own papers. “Producing the articles” is done by the authors! Moreover, everyone in my field also publishes their work for free on the arXiv. Articles can be disseminated over the internet at negligible cost via a number of routes as well as the arXiv.

No, Mr Taylor, the process of academic publishing you describe in your article went out the window years ago. Now virtually everything is done by academics apart from the bit at which the academic publishers really excel – the imposition of extortionate costs to maintain your profits. The fact is that the academic publishing industry is not only redundant but also parasitic. The only viable solution is to bypass it altogether.

Another particularly specious bit of argument is the following:

Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals.

This may be the case, but the problem is that the money that underwrites this thriving export industry is taken from a budget that was intended to be spent on research. As the science budget dwindles – yes, it is dwindling – an ever-increasing proportion is being devoted to supporting these racketeers. Can you imagine the outcry if taxpayer’s money were used to support other private publishing interests, perhaps even the porn industry?

And consider this:

However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.

The real scandal is that the cost of journal subscriptions has gone up at all when the real cost of digital publishing has plummeted over the same period. All the price increase has done is line the pockets of folk who seem to think they have a God-given right to sponge off the public purse. And so what if they have created a plethora of extra journals? That’s just to acquire more raw material to mark up and sell on to the gullible consumer.

Returning to the subject of Open Access, Mr Taylor argues for a model in which scholarly publishers can continue to fleece the research sector but in a way that’s different from their current racket. They want authors to pay a huge fee up-front (a “paper management fee” perhaps £2000) to have their paper published. Such a system would have the merit of making research available free of charge to anyone who is interested in it, but in terms of its function as a scam it is just as ludicrous as the current racket. Since authors do all the work anyway, there’s no reason to charge an amount anything like this. It simply does not cost  £2000 to publish papers on the internet!  Any fee of this magnitude would just be fed to the parasites.

The activities of academic publishing industry are no longer relevant when it comes to dissemination of research results; academics can do that for ourselves. You have done very well for yourselves at our expense, but you’ve been rumbled. Time to face the music.

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Another take on Academic Publishing..

Posted in Open Access with tags on May 6, 2012 by telescoper

Here’s another take on the Academic Publication racket that I found through a trackback to one of my posts. It misses the point in a number of places, but is well worth a read.

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