#thecostofknowledge

The growing popularity of the site reflects discontent amongst universities and academics. Grumblings at various institutions over rising subscription fees have contributed to a sense of apathy amongst leading academics. In 2012 a group of mathematicians started a campaign encouraging researchers to boycott Elsevier journals. They produced a petition that was ultimately signed by 12,000 academics.  The action was seemingly successful in preventing an Elsevier backed piece of legislation called the Research Works Act being pursued in the US congress. However the campaign has led to little meaningful change since.

Elsevier’s profits for 2014 were approximately £680 million, not typical of the quaint curators of knowledge that one might imagine. Does this level of profit match the service they provide? The internet has a history of quashing companies that make distributing their product unnecessarily fiddly and rewarding services that are easy to use and non restrictive, Netflix for example. Even on university campuses attempting to access a paper that your university should have access to can be difficult. This process use is even more cumbersome off campus.

In contrast Sci-Hub is quick, with a simple clean interface and no log in process. An experimental search for a paper, on limbic stem cells from the early 1980’s ,yielded an immediate link to a pdf. Not only was this paper free, it was actually easier to obtain than by legitimate means. Traditional publishing will need to keep pace in terms of ease of use to continue to compete.

Is a revolution in the scientific publishing model on the horizon? Certainly it seems that the value that publishers provide to the academic process in the internet age is rapidly diminishing. The most important parts of the process, the research and peer review, are provided to the publishers free of charge.Would a model that combined open publishing of all papers with a more rigorous post publication review process be capable of ending traditional publishing? Being more willing to publish negative results would arguably improve the scientific process,while major paper retractions, STAP cells for example,have demonstrated that the peer review system is not infallible.

In my opinion, although the profits generated by the publishing industry are vastly outsized for their role, essentially as academic middle men, they still have some fight left in them. Their greatest strength is the prestige of the journals they curate.What scientists want is simple;to do innovative research and share it with their peers in the best journals. While high impact journals such as Nature or the Lancet continue to set the the direction of research and dominate academic discourse the big publishers will continue to wield great influence and will find a way of turning a profit. The revolution will have to wait for a while.