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The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.
Edit: Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by devlux on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:17AM
It's about making the access available to those who otherwise couldn't pay.
Sure it might deprive the publishers of money.
For the researcher who is trying to "get published", the publisher is acting as a barrier by only allowing access to those with the not inconsequential sums of money required to purchase a full subscription.
However they are not providing anything of value in this transaction.
The cost to society from even allowing this paywall behavior especially on research that is primarily funded by government grants is enormous.
I would argue with a straight face that the only way this could actually cost the "publisher" money is if the publisher paid for the research. Otherwise they are just using their position as a "journal of note", to abuse the researcher into signing away their rights to publish wherever the heck they want, in favor of exclusivity to that single publisher. This actually blocks most of the rest of the world from being able to freely fact check and ensure that the science was performed correctly. In other-words one of the fundamental cornerstones of good science "peer review" is very much harmed by this exclusivity.
As for actual ownership.
If it was paid for by public grant money then the results of said research belongs to the public. If it was paid for by private grant money then of course it belongs to the private institution. But simply having copies circulating does not deprive the author of funds, the author isn't getting anything from the publisher and the only thing the publisher brought to the table was a place of notoriety in which to publish. In many cases the publisher doesn't even fact check or edit. Here is a citation http://www.nature.com/news/investigating-journals-the-dark-side-of-publishing-1.12666 [nature.com]
The author, who is the only party for whom deprivation of income could really be argued was already paid via the grant. They are not harmed are in fact helped by having their research circulating as widely as possible.