wouldn’t make more sense to make it available, to actually improve the world’s knowledge ?
In: 2
/u/Mastodon996 and /u/Expert-Hurry655, both wrong. If only it were like that.
>Some research articles are free, and others are behind paywalls. Why? Because it costs money to operate. If you see a research paper you’d like to read that’s behind a paywall, any public or university library should be able to get you a copy, because most of them have subscriptions.
>But research is expensive and scientists need to bring food to the table too. Someone needs do pay for all that and whoever pays can decide where the results go, if an aerospace industry company is researching on a new material, they do that because they hope to make proffit in the future.
Research *is* expensive, and researchers do need to make a living (most in academia don’t earn particularly much relative to the time/education investment needed to get to their positions).
But the paywalls you’re seeing do not fund these researchers and their projects. It is an entirely for-profit middle-man business run by the journal publishers, a model that persists only because they have the power of establishment on their side. Scientists must publish to stay relevant and *stay funded*, and publishing is controlled by these journals who extract fees from the scientists to publish their work, too. And the peer review process, where impartial experts judge the quality of submitted work before publication, playing a major part in the editorial role for journals? Those scientists aren’t paid for their time either. Journals take and take, and make everyone else pay for things they didn’t create, with minimal operating costs — all they have to do is host the research papers, and print some paper copies. The profit margins on this business are *ludicrous*.
Some countries are attempting to break up this model. I believe in the US, regulations are being put in place currently that force academic work funded by taxpayer money (a huge share of research funding!) to be made available free of charge to the public within a year.
There are also certain fields, mostly around computer science, that are breaking free of this themselves by launching open publication platforms and collectively trusting/supporting them, taking away traditional journals’ prestige factor.
Source: am in academia.
Latest Answers