John Conyers and Academic Publishing
Posted on Thursday, March 05, 2009
Lawrence Lessig has a blog post about John Conyers' incredibly stupid H.R. 801:
The law would forbid entities like the NIH from requiring that recipients of government grants make the product of their research openly accessible. (The current practice requires articles be freely accessible after 12 months.) Instead, Conyers' proposal would require that after the American taxpayer has paid for the research, the American taxpayer must pay publishers to get access to the product of the research.
This may sound stupid to you already: if taxpayers fund research, why should they not have access to the results? But if you’re not familiar with the whacky world of academic publishing, you may not fully appreciate the stupidity. Lessig explains:
The first important word to emphasize in the last sentence is "publishers." For unlike the ordinary market for creative work, here, the author isn't paid for his work through the copyright system. It is the government (indirectly) paying for the research that the author (a scientist) creates. Scientists write articles as part of their job; other scientists peer-review those articles (usually for free); and journals then publish those articles without paying the author anything. Those journals, however, then charge libraries across the world an increasingly high rate to get access to the research in those journals. As the industry has become more concentrated, those rates have skyrocketed -- rising much faster than inflation.
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I have less than warm feelings about the academic publishing industry. This is a perfect example why. What value do they add in an age when content distribution costs virtually nothing? What’s stopping academics from starting up their own journals, or simply flocking to open access efforts already under way? After all, if this setup is screwing us so badly, why don’t we just change it, right?
Three reasons stand out to me, at least from where I sit in sociology:
academic publishing is all about status. People want to publish their work in existing, high status journals. Starting up a brand new journal—and building a reputation for that journal—is very, very hard. If someone has an article that they feel deserves publication in a top journal, any new journal is going to have a very hard time persuading them to submit it to them first.
If you publish an article in ASR, Contexts or any ASA journal, ASA owns the copyright, not the author, or the publisher for that matter. They depend on revenue from the journals to exist as an organization.
Most academics are completely clueless about the rights they sign away to publishers. Let’s put it this way: at Contexts we hire freelance journalists to write an occasional feature for us, usually one per issue. We had to create a separate contract for them because we couldn’t get any of them to go near the contract our publisher asks sociologists to sign (and sign they do, usually without question).