Didi Park Mr. Miller English 11 P.

. 2 18 December 2013 Abolishing the Academic Paywall: Replacing Paid-Subscription Journals with Open-Access Journals One of the internets most attractive features is its ability to disseminate information. It has changed the way scientists share their findings. New research has been published in print scientific journals since the late 1600s1, but modern technology has brought on the advent of online scientific journals searchable in databases. They allow for faster publishing and make it easier for users to find papers on specific topics. However, many of these online databases require a paid subscription, also known as a paywall for access. This isnt a big issue for many members of academia, who can access these databases from their schools library subscription. But why should access to scientific papers be limited to those connected to institutions of higher learning, people who are often of high socioeconomic status? Scientific articles should be available for everyone, including high school students and amateurs. Furthermore, the prices of subscriptions have been steadily rising2a. According to Stallman3, the cost of editing for a typical paper is between 1% and 3% of the cost of funding the research to produce it. In April 2012, The Harvard University Library wrote a memorandum to the faculty stating that Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally

unsustainable and academically restrictive.4 Online journal publishing has become more of a monopoly as large companies take over the market2b. I propose that the paywall be completely abolished and that scientific articles be published in open-access journals. Costs would be accounted for by submission fees. Those who publish are usually scientists whose careers depend on the volume and quality of what they publish, so higher submission fees would not necessarily discourage publishing. Open-access journals have been shown to increase citations5. Though open-access journals generally have lower funding and less revenue than paid-subscription journals, they do not necessarily have lower quality standards: the journal of the Public Library of Science was the only journal out of many, including more prestigious ones, to reject a spoof paper6. Of course, there are problems with the abolishment of the paywall and the establishment of purely open-access journals. As mentioned earlier, open access journals charge the publisher (author of an article) much more than paidsubscription journals, so that less well-established scientists have less opportunity to publish. Open-access journals also have a higher variation in quality because of a lack of quality peer review due to lower maintenance funds7.

Works Cited 1. http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2661 2. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-sciencebehind-a-paywall a) price increases as high as 145% over the past 6 years b) Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics 3. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/stallman.html 4. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-universityjournal-publishers-prices 5. http://singularityhub.com/2012/03/18/8200-strong-researchers-bandtogether-to-force-science-journals-to-open-access/ 6. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full 7. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/a-problem-with-openaccess-journals/ He identified 304 open access journals that publish in English. He created a fake scientific paper with blatant fatal flaws that rendered the research uninterpretable and the paper unpublishable. He actually created 304 versions of this paper by simply inserting different variables into the same text, but keeping the science and the data the same. He then submitted a version of the paper to all 304 journals under different fake names from different fake universities (using African names to make it seem plausible that they were obscure). The result? over half of the papers were accepted for publication.