Open Access

Compilation of OA news from The Scientist

"In 2018, Elsevier’s revenue grew by 2 percent, to a total of $3.2 billion. Gemma Hersh, a senior vice president for global policy at Elsevier, says the company’s net profit margin was 19 percent (more than double the net profit of Netflix)."
June 10, 2019

“At first they weren’t exploitatively priced. But the publishers noticed the demand was inelastic and they could get away with selling these things for much higher prices.”
— Ted Bergstrom, a professor of economics at UC Santa Barbara, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times
Feb 28, 2019

“…an open access citation advantage as high as 19% exists, even when articles are embargoed during some or all of their prime citation years.”
September 30, 2016

"Any industry that can increase its prices by 1,041 percent over a 38-year period—as the textbook industry did between 1977 and 2015, according to an NBC News analysis—is one that knows how to keep, and hold, an audience...These days, publishers tend to make $40 in pure profit on a $180 book—a 22 percent margin. 'The educational materials and publishing industry in five to 10 years will be completely remade," OpenStax's Richard Baraniuk told University Business in 2014, "just as the music industry, the newspaper industry and the computer software industry were completely remade by the internet.'"
August 29, 2016

Researchers sign over the copyright and provide their work, often taxpayer funded, free to publishers who then get other researchers to review the papers — also free. The publishers then sell journal subscriptions — some titles cost more than $5,000 a year — back to universities and the federal government. And if someone wants an article, that costs about $35, so that person is paying for the research and to read the results….
… Expenses for journals and other subscriptions have risen 456 percent since 1986, according to the Association of Research Libraries.
March 24, 2016

Right now, American universities and government groups spend about $10 billion each year to access published science.... "The thing that concerns me is the idea that my university and others around the world are throwing money on a product that should cost almost nothing." - Timothy Gowers
March 4, 2016

While librarians may like to view themselves as facilitators between academics and publishers, Ms. Gardner says the problems in the scholarly-publishing system are too big to take on by themselves. She believes it is up to professors to speak up, and to publishers to explore more open-access options.
"The per-article model," she says, "hasn’t come into line with market norms the way we have seen with music songs being 99 cents."
February 18. 2016

"Many scholars say this system makes publishers rich—Elsevier, a company that controls access to more than 2,000 journals, has a market capitalization about equal to that of Delta Airlines—but does not benefit the academics that conducted the research, or the public at large….
…. In 2012, during a large-scale academic boycott of Elsevier, even well-endowed Harvard University announced it was having trouble paying large publishers’ annual fees. “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices,” the former director of the university’s library told The Guardian. Well-organized boycotts and open-access movements continue to flourish in academia."
February 9, 2016

Imagine you’ve spent the last few years writing a manuscript. You submit it to a publisher, and they make you an offer: They’ll print it, but once it’s published, they own your work. They’ll sell it to people who want to read it, but you won’t see any of the profits. Alternatively, if you pay the publisher to print your work, they’ll release it to the public for free.
These are the options for academics publishing their research in mainstream journals—but that’s begun to change over the past several years, as academics have started to push more strongly for better options.
January 26, 2016

"The paper by McKiernan et al describes the social media effect – open access articles are more likely to be shared via Twitter and Facebook, for example, than non-open access papers – resulting in increased attention and publicity. As most of our lives revolve around such applications this may result in work getting noticed by a wider audience. This has the potential to lead to media attention for publicly available research, collaborative possibilities, and special funding opportunities. The paper also highlights evidence that articles covered by the media garner higher citation rates, which can only be a positive factor to a striving researcher. "
January 6, 2016

"For no additional charge beyond subscription fees, 30% of research published by Dutch researchers in Elsevier journals will be open access by 2018."
December 11, 2015

This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal.
November 16, 2015

" If we discourage researchers from openly licensing their research or publishing with open access presses then we run the risk of legitimising the status quo and perpetuating a publishing system that is economically unviable and damaging on so many levels."
August 24, 2015

"When entering the research world, Early Career Researchers (ECRs) may encounter difficulties building a good reputation for their research, its quality and the research results. Open access is the movement that could assist ECRs to: (a)widely disseminate their scholarly outputs, (b)demonstrate the research and societal impact of their work and, (c)organise online research portfolios that can be accessed by all researchers, as well as prospective employers."
2015

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“If every student had just one of their traditional textbooks replaced with…an open [access] textbook, it would save students more than $1 billion dollars annually.”
February 24, 2015