Loveletters

Working in academic research is somewhat disillusioning. There are a bunch of reasons, like stupid personal grudges, the kindergarden that is a department of x, etc.
One of the most upsetting to me is the whole publication/research/patent complex. With industry funded research I can understand that a company is so reluctant to give away the results, but the same can not apply to publicly funded research. The system as it works now does not have the option of “regular” people accessing the research that they are paying for through taxes. Further, other scientists working in the same field do not necessarily have access to publicly funded research results. Last year the Europea Commision published a study on the scientific publication system in it they made the following recomendations:

* Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research, at the time of publication and also long-term
* A “level-playing field” so that different business models in publishing can compete fairly in the market
* Ranking scientific journals by quality, defined more widely than pure scientific excellence, but also taking into account factors such as management of copyright, search facilities and archiving
* Developing pricing strategies that promote competition in the journal market
* Scrutinising major mergers that may take place in this sector in the future
* Promoting the development of electronic publication, for example by eliminating unfavourable tax treatment of electronic publications and encouraging public funding and public-private partnerships to create digital archives in areas with little commercial investment.

A petiton sponserd by i.a. the DFG is now asking for:

The following actions could be taken at the European level: (i) Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives, and (ii) Explore with Member States and with European research and academic associations whether and how such policies and open repositories could be implemented.

This would make research more easily possible and would reduce the amount of money publishers like Elsevier^[1] can make of of public research. I think it is a perversion of the system that public research euros go essentially to the publisher. Not only do you have to pay to publish a paper and other scientists pay to read it, you also lose the rights to the published work. It makes my head want to explode. I agree that there is some moral grey space, as to how soon public research should become publically accesible, but the petitioners have taken this into consideration. I suggest you read it and then sign, even if you are not at a European research institution.

1. oh, how much I despise them, more than other publishers. [↩]

Like

Unlike