A broken system

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to show how important it is to have free access to the latest research and data. How else can researchers, medical and public health professionals advise governments on appropriate actions? Unfortunately, the way we share research is an absolute disgrace and has created an industry with higher profit margins than Amazon and Google.

Traditional publishers pay writers for their articles and employ editors to commission and check. Academic publishers outsource all of that to the research community. Not only do we do that checking – peer reviewing – we do it for free. And rather than being paid for our writing, we often pay the publisher to publish our articles, which then go straight behind a paywall.

Academic publishers then sell our articles back to our institutions in journal subscriptions. In another twist, what publishers charge for their journals is commercially sensitive so different institutions are probably paying wildly different prices for similar deals. To give you some idea of costs, the University of California has a subscription budget of about US$50 million (NZ$78m) a year. Not everyone has a budget like that, so subscriptions create a massive inequity between who gets access to the latest research and who doesn’t.

In fairness, many journals now allow researchers to pay an ‘‘open access’’ fee to make their articles accessible to everyone. But this has led to thousands of fake journals popping up to scam researchers looking for an affordable way to publish their research.

When the new coronavirus emerged, many academic publishers pledged to make any articles related to the pandemic open access. This has meant everyone around the world has had equitable and timely access to the latest information about Covid-19, but it’s not clear how long this will last.

The University of California has just reached an interesting agreement with the world’s second-biggest academic publisher. For the next four years, Springer Nature will make the articles of more than 2700 of its journals available to the university without a subscription fee, and the university and its researchers will pay Springer Nature a fee for every article they get accepted. That will mean the article is published open access.

It’s clear that Covid-19 is disrupting much of the world as we knew it. My hope is that we come out of this pandemic with an academic publishing model fit for purpose.

That has to be better than the current system of handing over vast amounts of public money that could have been spent on research.

The way we share research is an absolute disgrace and has created an industry with higher profit margins than Amazon and Google.