Time for academics to withdraw free labour

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Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows. Academics work their butts off to get research funding, often from government. They then do the research and write up and submit it for publication. They run the gauntlet of picky reviewers and editors to get the work accepted for publication. Once it is published, it appears in a journal which is sold on to academic institutions for large profits. Post publication, the academic often has to pay a cost equivalent to several hardback books to get a formatted electronic copy of the article. Meanwhile, the journals justify this by arguing they have extensive costs. But in fact, it is the academic community that does the bulk of the work for free, acting as editors and peer reviewers. Increasingly, they are expected also to do copy editing and graphic design, tasks that were previously undertaken by professional journal staff.

It has taken many years for the torpid academic community to wake up to this ludicrous situation, but things are slowly starting to change. In some fields, academics are starting to take things into their own hands and cut commercial publishers out of the loop, but this still the exception rather than the rule. A more widely adopted innovation has been Open Access publishing. On the one hand, electronic publishing has made it possible for journal papers to be posted online and made freely accessible. On the other, major funders, notably NIH in the USA and the Wellcome Trust in the UK, have insisted that researchers whom they fund must make their published work Open Access. Obviously, something has to give: the publishers are not going to do their work for nothing. But the system does work, with a combination of new journals that are Open Access from the start, and older ones agreeing to make selected articles Open Access, in both cases for a fee. In general, the funders agree to pay the charge.

This week, however, a story broke suggesting that the traditional publishers are trying to fight back and force NIH to backtrack on its Open Access policy. Things hotted up with this post from Michael Eisen who noted that one major publisher, Elsevier, has been lobbying a NY Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, to persuade her to support a bill that would limit Open Access publishing. Harvard University gave a detailed response to the bill, which can be found here.

I want my response to this story to go beyond just tut-tutting and shaking my head.  Academics do have some power here. We provide the articles for Elsevier journals, and we do a lot of unpaid work reviewing and editing for them. None of us wants to restrict our opportunities for publishing, but these days there are a lot of outlets available. When deciding where to submit a paper, I suspect that most academics, like me, take little notice of who the publisher of a journal is. I focus more on whether the journal has a good editor, my prior experience of publication lags, and whether Open Access is available. But as from now, I shall include publisher in the criteria I adopt, and avoid Elsevier as far as I can. Also, if asked to review for a journal, I’ll check if it is in the Elsevier stable, using this handy website, and if so, I’ll explain why I’m not prepared to review. I suggest that if you are as annoyed as I am by this story, you do likewise, and refuse to engage with Elsevier journals.

Addendum, 10th January 2012

Some people on Twitter have asked if people should be paid for the work they do as author/editor/reviewer. Definitely not. It would just make matters worse, because publishers would factor in these costs and charge even more for journals.

No, I just want a change in the model whereby publishers make enormous and undeserved profits from academics. There are various ways this could be done.

1. The publishers could charge less: currently if you try and download a single journal article, you are charged around £20, even though the production costs are minimal.

2. Retain the current model but remove commercial publishers from the loop, with publication of research limited to learned societies, universities, funders.

3. Retain the current model but make all journals Open Access, with the funder or university paying a one-off publication fee.

4. More radically, move to a system such as arxiv, which I discussed here.

On the whole, academics are an interesting bunch. We’re not all that interested in money, but we are skilled and can produce things of commercial value. It’s a golden opportunity for someone who does want to make money to step in a make a profit. Publishers like Elsevier would have been fine if they hadn’t been so greedy and had charged modest sums for their product. Instead, they pushed costs as high as the market could bear, making huge profits, while at the same time giving authors less and less. (Copy-editors have become an endangered species). Instead of facilitating scientific communication, they have put obstacles in the way. But part of the blame lies with the academic community, who have been far too passive. We should have tackled this years ago before it got out of hand.