Over a month ago I was building a website to video-podcast the recorded lectures from the Research Society on Alcoholism's annual conference. While I was making the RSA Lecture Series website, my mentor/P.I. had me purchase the copyright permissions for the figures and graphs the presenters used on their Powerpoint slides so we could post them online. They weren't cheap; anywhere from $30 – $200 bucks a figure, graph, or table. I thought it was somewhat ridiculous that we were buying back “our” own research. I didn’t realize that publishing companies appropriate the rights to everything. My question is, why do we let them get away with this? Twenty years ago they provided a necessary service – the printing and distribution of research. Now we have the internet, and while they don’t have us in a strangle-hold anymore, we keep signing away the rights to our own research.
To fully grasp how senseless the current M.O. for publishing research is, I offer this useful analogy: We don’t mind paying taxes to build roads, because we need roads. The Tollway builds roads with their own money, and usually there is an incentive to use them instead of the ones that we’ve already purchased with our tax dollars. So we don’t mind paying the toll. It would be pretty crazy if we spent all this tax money building roads, have our state engineers inspect them for quality, and then just hand them over to the Tollway so they can collect a profit every time someone uses them. This is what we do with our research, though. We use grant money to pay for the subscriptions we need, and for journals that our university doesn’t subscribe to. Essentially, we conduct the research, write the articles, do the peer-review, and hand it all over to them...and then buy it back. It’s important to consider - under this system, much of the funding and all of the research eventually ends up in the hands of the publishing companies. Oh, and the 400 dollar a year price tag on some of these journals? It’s not the ink! TIME magazine costs around 15 dollars for 36 issues, and they actually pay their writers (unlike the Axon).
Bradley Monakhos 28 June 2009