I’m a student at a large public university in the United States. I’m also curious about the world – if I hear something on the news or in conversation that sparks my interest or that doesn’t make sense to me, I like to do a little research about the subject so that my viewpoint can evolve. And just because I’m into art doesn’t mean I can’t handle technical or scientific jargon when necessary, if I want to understand precisely how the brain’s dopamine receptors work or exactly how much “water” was found on Mars a few weeks ago.
Last week I was doing research at school for a writing class project. I had found a few good journal articles on my subject via Google Scholar. My professor suggested that I dig through the references list of an article we already had to find some good source material, which sounded like a good idea. There were probably fifty or sixty references listed in the article I chose. I typed the name of the first article into Google Scholar and clicked the title. Then I looked for the full version of the article, which I should’ve been able to access through our university library’s server.
No dice.
“Your academic institution does not currently subscribe to this journal. Please contact them to gain access to the full version of this article,” it told me. Something like that.
It was the same message for about 50% of the sources referenced in that article. Despite the fact that I was on campus at a world-renowned research university, doing actual *research,* I could not access sources I needed to fact-check this paper.
Granted, I’m not doing an actual study on the subject I was looking up. I understand that academic journals used to be exclusively available in print form (and that many still are only available in this manner) and that this is an expensive process. I understand that an academic publishing company is a business, with probably only one objective, which is to make money. But this is the 21st century now, folks. Everything is digital. The submission process for articles? Digital. The “printing” process? Computerized. Publishing costs have dropped dramatically.
So why do these companies still charge hundreds or thousands of dollars annually to individuals and libraries? Why do they withhold information that could allow our collective knowledge to increase tenfold, if only everybody could hear about it? The writers of the articles – the scientists and investigators who are actually out in the field doing meticulous studies of human behavior and deep-ocean habitats – are not paid by the journals for their articles. Researchers publish their articles through these journals so that their findings can be seen by a wider audience (not necessarily a large audience, but, well, if I was looking for this stuff, somebody else is bound to be looking for it too).
I understand that the average North American probably doesn’t need or want access to this stuff. However, if the state in which you live has a public research university (and I believe that most, if not all, states do), then your tax dollars are probably paying for a good chunk of this research, and I think that means you should have the right to access it! In any case, why should this kind of thing be kept from university students? They spend anywhere from four to ten years in school, attempting to soak up as much new knowledge as they possibly can in order to better the world. They will be the ones writing all of those articles in the very near future. If academic publishers would lower their subscription rates, researchers could learn new things and write MORE articles.
This is something that has been on my mind for a couple of weeks now, and I can’t shake it. I get that businesses can do essentially whatever they want to in our economy, and that organizations with large profits often fail to care about the effects of their money-making systems. They aren’t required to be ethical. But I believe this practice as the somewhat unethical hindrance of scientific progress, and it drives me mad.
Just one poorly-researched opinion.
For an article about just one alternative payment system, see this Article on Open Access Model (Author Pays).
SPARC is an organization fighting for students’ rights to access research journals.
