photo cred: my dad
If you ever want a good laugh, ask an academic to explain what they get paid to do, and who pays them to do it.
In STEM fields, it works like this: the university pays you to teach, but unless you’re at a liberal arts college, you don’t actually get promoted or recognized for your teaching. Instead, you get promoted and recognized for your research, which the university does not generally pay you for. You have to ask someone else to provide that part of your salary, and in the US, that someone else is usually the federal government. If you’re lucky—and these days, very lucky—you get a chunk of money to grow your bacteria or smash your electrons together or whatever, you write up your results for publication, and this is where the monkey business really begins.
In most disciplines, the next step is sending your paper to a peer-reviewed journal, where it gets evaluated by an editor and (if the editor sees some promise in it) a few reviewers. These people are academics just like you, and they generally do not get paid for their time. Editors maybe get a small stipend and a bit of professional cred, while reviewers get nothing but the warm fuzzies of doing “service to the field”, or the cold thrill of tanking other people’s papers.
If you’re lucky again, your paper gets accepted by the journal, which now owns the copyright to your work. They do not pay you for this! If anything, you pay them an “article processing charge” for the privilege of no longer owning the rights to your paper. This is considered a great honor.
The journals then paywall your work, sell the access back to you and your colleagues, and pocket the profit. Universities cover these subscriptions and fees by charging the government “indirect costs” on every grant—money that doesn’t go to the research itself, but to all the things that support the research, like keeping the lights on, cleaning the toilets, and accessing the journals that the researchers need to read.
Nothing about this system makes sense, which is why I think we should build a new one. In the meantime, though, we should also fix the old one. But that’s hard, for two reasons. First, many people are invested in things working exactly the way they do now, so every stupid idea has a constituency behind it. Second, our current administration seems to believe in policy by bloodletting: if something isn’t working, just slice it open at random. Thanks to these haphazard cuts and cancellations, we now have a system that is both dysfunctional and anemic.
I see a way to solve both problems at once. We can satisfy both the scientists and the scalpel-wielding politicians by ridding ourselves of the one constituency that should not exist. Of all the crazy parts of our crazy system, the craziest part is where taxpayers pay for the research, then pay private companies to publish it, and then pay again so scientists can read it. We may not agree on much, but we can all agree on this: it is time, finally and forever, to get rid of for-profit scientific publishers.
MOMMY, WHERE DO SCAMS COME FROM?
The writer G.K. Chesterton once said that before you knock anything down, you ought to know how it got there in the first place. So before we show for-profit publishers the pointy end of a pitchfork, we ought to know where they came from and why they persist.
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