Taking Back Control of Research & Scholarly Publishing

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Abstract

Science is built, enhanced, and developed through the open and structured sharing of knowledge. Yet some publishers charge so much for subscriptions to their academic journals that even the libraries of the world’s wealthiest universities such as Harvard are no longer able to afford the prices. Those publishers’ profit margins rival those of the most profitable companies in the world, even though research is largely underwritten by governments, and the publishers don’t pay authors and researchers or the peer reviewers who evaluate those works. How is such an absurd structure able to sustain itself—and how might we change it?Scholarly publishing, as a critical part of the broader mission of institutions of higher education to create and communicate knowledge, may no longer simply argue that the quality of its work is self-evident.

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