Starting in the late s, publishers increasingly pushed sales of their subscriptions into large bundled deals. The publishers argue the new mode of digital delivery has come with an array of additional costs. The publishers also say that the volume of articles they publish every year increases costs, and that libraries ought to be funded to pay for them. The librarians beg to differ. For universities, the most frustrating development is that cost of access keeps rising at a very steep rate.
Take a look at this graph from the Association of Research Libraries. It shows the percent change in spending at university libraries. Over that time, the consumer price index — the average increase of costs of common household goods — rose percent. The University of Virginia has a website where you can see how much money its library is spending on journals.
The data shows that the university is also spending a lot of money for journals that no one who uses their library system reads. Why are universities paying for journals that no one reads? An individual journal subscription can cost a university thousands of dollars.
That is, canceling the subscription that gives UNC Chapel Hill students and faculty access to thousands of Elsevier journals. A lot of the money that fuels this system comes from government grants. This year, a consortium of public research institutions in Norway canceled its Elsevier contract, a move that followed a research consortium in Hungary breaking ties with the Dutch giant.
These institutions and funders are also banding together as part of Coalition S : The agreement says all scientific publications that have sprung from publicly funded research grants must be published on open access journals or platforms by Currently, publishers typically charge academics to publish that way too. Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.
This brings us to another band of revolutionaries in the fight against the status quo: the scientists who want to find ways to circumvent the behemoth publishers. Basically, scientists trade in their hard work, their results for their toils in the lab, for free, to a private industry that makes tons of money off their work, in return for prestige.
Some researchers have been waking up to this and spinning off freely accessible journals of their own. One of those scholars is a University of Cambridge mathematician named Timothy Gowers.
In , he wrote a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research and vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from Elsevier. To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a boycott of Elsevier by researchers around the world.
The CRS was originally formed by a coterie of five publishing giants — Elsevier, ACS, Brill, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer — to pressure scientist social networking site Researchgate into taking down 7 million unauthorized copies of their papers. Before Elbakyan was a pirate, she was an aspiring scientist with a knack for philosophizing and computer programming. For years, the focus had been entertainment, but now it was rapidly pivoting toward academic piracy.
New anti-piracy laws, which targeted what Elbakyan saw as essential information sharing, hit home for her: in Kazakhstan, illicit file-sharing had just become punishable by up to five years in prison. She felt that the only responsible choice was to join the fray herself.
She operated it without a repository for downloaded articles. It would automatically be deleted six hours later. In , she struck a partnership with LibGen, which had only archived books until then. LibGen asked Elbakyan to upload the articles Sci-Hub was downloading. If so, she pulled it from its archive. That worked well until the domain LibGen. Around 1 million of these papers [were] uploaded from Sci-Hub. The other[s], as I was told, came from databases that were downloaded on the darknet.
One official at Marquette University, alleges to have seen evidence of Sci-Hub phishing for credentials. Elbakyan vociferously denies this and has previously said that many academics have even offered their login information. At the time, according to testimony the publisher later gave in its lawsuit, Elsevier was aware that Sci-Hub had paid some students for access to their university credentials. And several PayPal payments had been sent to Elbakyan for buying a proxy server that would allow Sci-Hub to authenticate itself as a student.
In fact, Elsevier was leading the way among academic publishers. In , Elsevier shut down an international piracy operation wherein a Vietnamese entrepreneur was selling digital copies of journals to academics.
The publisher, both on its own, and through at least one industry group, the American Association of Publishers, pushed Congress for laws that that would have made it easier for publishers to more easily coerce ISPs, search engines, and DNS services to block access to a site — or force advertisers and payment services to drop their support for copyright violators. Increasing their own power to enforce copyright claims was protecting their intellectual property.
And though the bills sparked intense backlash for many companies that supported them, individual academic publishers like Elsevier were overlooked. That same year, the AAP and Elsevier also supported and lobbied in favor of a bill that would have prevented the government from requiring agencies to make research published through a journal Open Access at any point. Facing backlash, Elsevier reversed its position. Despite its meteoric rise, the boycott ultimately faded with little concrete effect on the publishing giant.
Months before targeting Elbakyan, Elsevier helped 17 other publishers shut down the pirate academic repository Library. Between and , Elsevier and the AAP also opposed and lobbied against three bills — the Federal Research Public Access Act , Public Access to Public Science Act , and Fair Access to Science and Technology Research — all of which proposed making it mandatory that copies of papers from federally funded research be deposited in an Open Access repository after some period.
Later, it also attempted to force Cloudflare, an internet security service, to turn over logs that would identify the operators of LibGen and Bookfi.
So instead, it steadily set court precedents that did the same thing. Every one of the members of the coalition has their own Open Access journals. And they all also allow scientists to upload a copy of preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers to Open Access archives. The actions of the publishers in the coalition have simply shown an opposition to illegal and unauthorized sharing, Milne says. Before suing Sci-Hub, Elsevier attempted to stop Elbakyan technically. Nonetheless, by the time Elsevier took aim, Elbakyan was already a woman on a mission.
But in , Elbakyan left, disappointed. Now, once users pointed Sci-Hub toward an article, the site would check every university proxy server until it found one through which it could download the paper, and would download it automatically.
Elbakyan had defied Elsevier. Her former hobby had become her primary focus. Nothing would make her waiver from making Sci-Hub a titan of Open Access. After an isolationist policy enacted by the Kremlin sparked intense bickering between scientists and Elbakyan, she pulled the plug herself. Article 1: E-publishing in Developing Economies The drive to publish the results of research is global but presents special challenges in developing economies.
African researchers and publishers face many of the same problems that affect the global research community, but they are also confronted by a number of complex issues that have resulted in a lack of indigenous publishing and a lack of access to relevant material. Apart from financial problems, there are many infrastructural and cultural factors that affect the dissemination of quality information and have resulted in a poorly developed information economy and a lack of representation within the international research community.
This article provides an overview of some of the challenges facing African journal publishers, and by extension the African scholarly community, which needs to read and publish up-to-date research that is relevant to local interests while remaining international in quality. Traditional publishing models imported into the African context have not been able to deliver the desired results for a number of reasons.
The emergence of e-publishing models may provide African publishers with increased opportunities for the production and dissemination of scholarship and research findings, and two examples of Internet application in Africa are discussed. However, online technology is not a panacea for all the problems inherent in publishing in the developing world, and this article considers some problems not resolved - and some perhaps even caused - by the new models….
To read the full article, kindly click here. Pearce, C. E-publishing in Developing Economies. The vast majority of journals published in Africa today are languishing in obscurity because they are not known outside their institutions or region. Many journals published in Ghana, for example, cannot be found in universities or research institutions in Kenya. On the other hand, the scarcity of African journals in the libraries of the developed countries or on the Internet makes it difficult for anyone outside Africa to find information on some issues peculiar to the continent….
To read the full article, kindly click here Tonukari, N. Article 3: Research communications in the 21st century Scientific inquiry thrives only in a society that fosters the free flow of ideas and information. The power of online internet publication in democratizing science and incorporating scientists from developing countries into the scientific community is profound. The desired and obvious properties of scientific publishing such as accessibility, economy, quality, innovation, and retrieval can be more readily achieved with electronic methods.
Online publication is much cheaper and faster, and that is major reason Africa should embrace the open access model for research communication. An open access African journal the African Journal of Biotechnology is evaluated.
The concept of making the results of primary research freely available to anyone with an internet connection has caused a great stir in the media and science community Lipman, The sciences are undergoing a fundamental and difficult transition - from a mode of publication that has reigned for the years since the printing of the first scientific journals to a new mode made possible by computer science and the Internet.
This transition is going to occur within the next decade or two, and it is now important for both scientists and publishers to influence its pace and its form. The desired properties of scientific publishing - accessibility, economy, quality, innovation, and retrieval - seem obvious, and it seems equally obvious that most or all of these properties can be more readily achieved with electronic methods Varmus, Research communications in the 21st century.
In this general context, the negative effect of various bibliometric indicators in the evaluation of individual researchers cannot be understated.
The counting of papers indexed by large-scale bibliometric databases—which mainly cover journals published by commercial publishers, as we have seen in this paper—creates a strong incentive for researchers to publish in these journals, and thus reinforces the control of commercial publishers on the scientific community.
We would like to thank Sam Work for proofreading and editing the manuscript, as well as the two referees, for comments and suggestions. Conceived and designed the experiments: VL. Browse Subject Areas? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Data Availability: Aggregated data will be available on Figshare upon acceptance of the manuscript.
Introduction This year marks the th anniversary of the creation of scientific journals. Results Fig 1A presents, for Natural and Medical Sciences NMS and Social Sciences and Humanities NMS , the proportion of papers published by the top five publishers that account for the largest number of papers in , as well as the proportion of papers published in journals others than those of the top five publishers. Download: PPT. Fig 1. Percentage of Natural and Medical Sciences left panel and Social Sciences and Humanities right panel papers published by the top 5 publishers, — Fig 2.
Fig 3. Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline in the Natural and Medical Sciences, — Fig 4. Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline of Social Sciences and Humanities, — Fig 5. Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers in Physics, — Fig 6.
Evolution of the mean relative citation impact of papers, by distance to publisher change, — and — Discussion and Conclusion The effect of scientific societies On the whole, our results show that the top commercial publishers have benefited from the digital era, as it led to a dramatic increase in the share of scientific literature they published.
The economics of scholarly publishing As one might expect, the consolidation of the publishing industry led to an increase of the profits of publishers. Fig 7. General conclusions Since the creation of scientific journals years ago, large commercial publishing houses have increased their control of the science system. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Sam Work for proofreading and editing the manuscript, as well as the two referees, for comments and suggestions.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: VL. References 1. Little Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press; Haustein S. Multidimensional journal evaluation. Analyzing scientific periodicals beyond the impact factor.
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Patterns of evaluation in science—institutionalisation, structure and functions of referee systems. View Article Google Scholar 5. Chicago: Chicago University Press; Meadows AJ. The Scientific Journal. London: Aslib; Access to the results of scientific research: developments in Victorian Britain.
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