Arash Abizade, Guardian - If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds. The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.
Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell
access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions
that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place.
Universities need access to journals because these are where most
cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to
these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some
universities are struggling to
afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general
public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information
they need. MORE
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