Disruptive forces in the “staggeringly profitable” business of academic publishing

There is an excellent long read in today’s Guardian: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

Learn how academic publishing became so profitable, the rapid increase in library subscription costs (the serials crisis) and the start of Big Deals, and the development of open access as an alternative to subscription publishing (see also my other posts on open access).

Sci-Hub, a different way of disrupting the subscription and paywall model, is in the news at the moment: US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub – though it’s far from clear if or when they may receive any of it:

Meanwhile, Finnish researchers have launched a boycott against Elsevier: “The group behind Tiedonhinta.fi statement urges researchers to refrain from peer review and editorial duties for journals owned by publishing giant Elsevier.  The boycott is launched on a new website nodealnoreview.org. The site welcomes also signatures from international colleagues all around the world, who are worried about cost of and access to research literature in their own countries.”

Advertisements

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://darkarchive.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/disruptive-forces-profitable-business-academic-publishing/
darkarchive.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-18
84875
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:3UIVNI55R52BTX54YRPPXGXXMSWQPBVZ
<urn:uuid:971b2e6a-1c16-4d45-8a6f-c4261f5c2a27>
2019-04-23T04:04:02Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:KINBPNE2VW2WQXF7ZOGERM4XS2TT2QWM
<urn:uuid:798b338f-f143-44ec-9b1b-fb8f942a07ef>
https://darkarchive.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/disruptive-forces-profitable-business-academic-publishing/
response
<urn:uuid:3df752fa-a6c7-487b-866d-30f0c3d7f010>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-18
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-150-79-29.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/