Why it Shouldn't Matter Whether the Research Works Act Passes or Not
If you’re reading this post, you likely are already aware that Congress recently introduced a bill (H.R. 3699) that would roll back provisions that require certain kinds of taxpayer-funded research to be accessible to the public for free. I won’t go into the details, since it’s already been covered very nicely in many places.
While I am deeply disturbed that this bill has appeared (and I would love to see it go down in flames), at some level, part of me is actually glad that it is here, and I would further submit that it doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) matter whether this bill passes or not. Perhaps it would even be for the best if it does pass. Why? Because at the end of the day, we scientists are in the driver’s seat, and we decide how we disseminate our work. Unless companies like Elsevier lobby congress to require that we all submit our papers to their journals, we ourselves are complicit in the problem, and we hold the power to solve it, if we so choose.
David Crotty wrote a nice piece recently calling attention to the fact that much of the rhetoric on both sides of the issues has become overly emotional and inflammatory. He correctly points out that just because a subway was built with public money doesn’t mean that you have a right to ride it for free, nor does it mean that a commercial operator of that subway line doesn’t have a right to make a profit. This is all fair. However, if the fares on that subway prevented the vast majority of the public from riding it (and the subway operator were making enormous profits), then the public can and should be up in arms about the misuse of public funds. If the majority of taxpayers cannot access important medical research results because they are behind outrageous commercial publishing pay-walls, then the public has a right to be upset.
But who should the public be upset with? Clearly it is easy to be upset with fat-cat publishers like Elsevier. One could hardly ask for more James-Bond-esque villain from the dry world of academic publishing. When they’re not publishing fake journals or running international weapons shows, they ask scientists to write the papers (free of charge), then ask other scientists to peer review them (on a volunteer basis), and then charge the author thousands in page charges (which come out of grant funds) and extort their institutions to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars for the subscriptions to the journals (again, largely from public funds). Someone from the general public who does not have access to a University mega-library must further pay something like $25+ per article just to look at the paper. Meanwhile, they provide comparatively poor editorial services, host ancient-looking rarely-updated websites, and generally make the entire scientific process go slower. In exchange for all of the “value” they add, they demand authors transfer their rights to the paper, and they maintain a mind-blowing 36% operating profit margin
Now at this point, you might complain that I’m conflating the bad behavior of an individual company (or collection of companies) with an issue of principle — should the government be dictating the business model of a private company. We’ll get back to the “inflammatory” facts about Elsevier in a moment, but I fully agree that the government shouldn’t be dictating the business model of publishing houses. That’s fine, but the government already is in the business of telling me how I can and can’t spend grant money. Government funding agencies get quite a bit of say over how scientists spend taxpayer money (e.g. only coach class tickets, no money spent on food, etc. etc.). These are good restrictions, and scientists take them very seriously, because such provisions ensure that the government gets what they want out of the research money they spend. So, just as the government has the right to tell me not to spend taxpayer money on donuts for lab meetings, they should have a right to tell me not to spend government money submitting to journals that will squirrel away the research results and make them inaccessible to the public. The public absolutely has a right to demand this, and it has nothing to do with dictating anyone’s business model.
Furthermore, even leaving aside open-access mandates and the Research Works Act, the public has a right be pissed at scientists who choose to publish their work in places that are not accessible to the public, even if this is strictly “legal”. Scientists should exert social pressure on other scientists who do so. There are increasingly many open access alternatives whereby we can disseminate our work to the widest possible audience, and I believe that we have a duty to use them, putting that duty even above of the realities of “publish-or-perish”, to the extent that we are able. At the very least, we need to proactively foster an environment where, come grant review, or hiring or tenure-promotion time, we place value on publishing in open access venues. “Closed access” ought to be a dirty word.
Open access mandates have given scientists a “pass” on having to exercise our principles. We could keep submitting to the worst of publishers, knowing that our work would still get out to the public eventually. However, if the Research Works Act passes, it would force us to do the right thing. Supporters of the Research Works Act wax mistily about the importance of the free market, but it is exactly the power of the free market that I hope wins the day. The academic publishing world is indeed governed by market forces, but as in other “third party payer” situations (e.g. healthcare), the market is distorted by the fact that the payers and the decision makers are not the same. Scientists decide where to publish their work, using taxpayer money to do so. Academic scientists need to keep publishing if they want to keep their jobs and keep doing what they love, and thus scientists are put in the awkward spot of not always having the luxury of being able to put principle above survival. However, we have a responsibility to put the interests of the taxpaying public first. Patients should be able to read the latest research about their disease, entrepreneurs should have access to the latest information about technology coming out of universities to accelerate innovation, and the general public should have a direct window into how science really works.
Moreover, we scientists should stop setting ourselves up to be abused by publishing companies that charge too much and provide laughably terrible service in return, all while demanding sweeping rights to our work because of the “value” that they add. Scientists can vote with their research budgets and with their feet (papers). Publishers like the Public Library of Science prove that we can get both open access and better service. Traditional publishers like Nature Publishing Group and AAAS are also coming out in support of open access. This isn’t about for-profit vs. not-for-profit. It’s about open access.
Elsevier employees who I’ve talked to get uncomfortable and call “foul” when I bring up the company’s checkered past, but they can’t have it both ways. If they want to invoke the free market, then they have to accept that they are a company with an associated brand, and we are their customers. It absolutely matters that they have been behaving like an international band of thugs and villains. Especially in the modern market, “brand” includes corporate accountability. I’m the customer and I can choose to take my business elsewhere.
Scientists: stop submitting papers to organizations that exist to squeeze the life out of science. Stop reviewing for these journals. We can exert market forces to solve this problem.
The academy has long been the silent, sleeping giant in this industry. My only hope is that something as brazenly clumsy and greedy as the Research Works Act is enough to wake that giant.
Disclaimer:
In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to mention that one of my postdocs and I do have one Elsevier submission still in process from months before this whole Research Works Act thing blew up (yes, it takes that long to get a paper published there). We were invited to submit something (it’s one of those “best of conference” issues), and it seemed harmless at the time. I wasn’t excited about the fact that Elsevier was involved when we submitted initially (my first paper was in an Elsevier journal and I remember the process unfondly). Now that their involvement in pushing the RWA has come to light, I’m really unhappy about the situation.
The editorial process has been extremely poor throughout, which makes me doubly angry when I hear Elsevier and its minions go on and on about the value that they add. We have considered withdrawing the submission in protest, but since peer review has already taken place, we feel bad about wasting the effort of our colleagues who did the review. I’m hoping that we can get through the last throes of the publication process quickly, so that we can get this behind us. After that, I plan to sign the online petition at thecostofknowledge.com, wash my hands of this, and call it quits with Elsevier once and for all. I also plan to post a disclaimer alongside the version of the paper that I am allowed to post on my website under Elsevier’s awful policy encouraging others to steer clear.
