Afaren­sis asks Dem­b­s­ki on Open Access: Is He Hyp­ocrit­cal, Stu­pid, or Both?

Both.

This is the sim­ple answer to that sim­ple question.

The broad­er issue of open access is not so sim­ple. While Dem­b­ski’s under­stand­ing of the issue is both hyp­o­crit­i­cal and stu­pid, the issue of whether com­mer­cial sci­ence pub­lish­ers are hyp­o­crit­i­cal and stu­pid remains to be seen.

Evi­dence for hypocrisy is fair­ly easy to identify. 

Sci­en­tists give those pub­lish­ers their research, typ­i­cal­ly sign­ing over copy­right for that work to the pub­lish­er. In many cas­es those sci­en­tists also pay page charges to those same pub­lish­ers, so that those pub­lish­ers can have the priv­i­lege of tak­ing those sci­en­tists’ work from them. 

Sci­en­tists are begin­ning to feel that this sit­u­a­tion is not equi­table, and that the restric­tions on access­ing those pub­li­ca­tions online hurt not only authors, but researchers in the field. Con­gress has heard those com­plaints, and is push­ing for NIH fund­ed research to be made avail­able free of charge on some schedule.

They chose to hire PR firms and lob­by­ists. Their advi­sor has helped Exxon smear Green­peace, and worked to reha­bil­i­tate Enron’s Jef­frey Skilling. His advice to the pub­lish­ers of sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals is to under­stand that “Media mes­sag­ing is not the same as intel­lec­tu­al debate,” and that they ought to argue that mak­ing sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles and evi­dence more acces­si­ble “equals gov­ern­ment censorship.”

Hypocrisy, thy names are Else­vi­er, Wiley and the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Society.

Whether they are stu­pid is a hard­er ques­tion. Right now, a chunk of most fed­er­al grants winds up going to pay fees to pub­lish­ers. Those pub­lish­ers also sell adver­tis­ing, and charge tru­ly astound­ing sub­scrip­tion fees. They hire pro­fes­sion­al edi­tors, and can afford var­i­ous sorts of spe­cial­ists. They do not pay their peer review­ers, they don’t pay the authors, and they give rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle back to the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. The exor­bi­tant sub­scrip­tion fees mean that aca­d­e­m­ic libraries are forced to cut sub­scrip­tions for inter­est­ing but low­er pro­file jour­nals in order to main­tain sub­scrip­tions to the real­ly essen­tial journals.

The pub­lish­ers walk away from that sys­tem as win­ners. Soci­ety los­es. Researchers have a hard­er time find­ing exist­ing research, and the pub­lic at large has no way to access most orig­i­nal research. This means that even the sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic could not eval­u­ate new research that could help them make med­ical deci­sions, or be more active par­tic­i­pants in pol­i­cy discussions. 

There is no ques­tion that these pub­lish­ers add val­ue. But the cost of their jour­nals is many times the cost of jour­nals oper­at­ed by soci­eties, and the val­ue that they add is in no pro­por­tion to the cost dif­fer­ences. Mak­ing mon­ey like that is cer­tain­ly good busi­ness in the short term, but they are eat­ing their seed corn, weak­en­ing the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to make their prof­its. Whether you con­sid­er that stu­pid isn’t simple.