Why do academic journals make their content so expensive to the wider public?
Have you ever tried to access a research article in an academic journal, without using institutional access through a subscribing university of library? Let’s take a look at some examples: the British journal Nature charges 18.00 USD to access a single article in its latest issue. Science, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, charges 15.00 USD for 24 hour access to a single article, and the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, PNAS, charges 10.00 USD for 48 hours.
Why is it so expensive? Do journal publishers actually make significant revenue from sales to individuals not accessing through a subscription service? I haven’t done any research on this topic, but I would bet all of my biscuits that the answer is no. I would expect that the largest share in journal revenues comes from institutional and individual subscriptions, and that price per article per person paid through subscription is significantly lower. Perhaps this is to encourage subscriptions – after all, if one reads more than a handful of articles on Science or Nature in one year, a subscription would be better value (at least with current prices).
But what about individuals who might not normally read more than one or two articles per year? We often hear about some new and interesting research, and when we try to go a little deeper to learn about it, we hit a very discouraging pay-wall. If you don’t expect to be reading much from a single journal in the first place, you’re probably not going to pay for a subscription. At this point, you’re left with deciding to pay the premium or curb your interests.
In my opinion, perhaps the worst consequence of the current price scheme used by academic journals is that it insulates academic research from the general public, making science inaccessible, and forcing most people to depend on (often terrible and/or misleading) press coverage. I think the academic community would do a great social favour if it worked towards making primary source research content more affordable to the wider public.
Bad legislation and obsolete business models
Bad legislation is often a result of lobbying efforts from industrial groups trying their hardest to sustain an obsolete business model. In my last post, I mentioned a UK paper that, amongst other things, discussed how UK law is adversely affected by lobbying groups, and I also explained why I thought this was a huge problem in the US. Well, it doesn’t take long for new examples to come up. This week we saw Tennessee governor Bill Haslam signed a bill into law which classifies the “theft” of “entertainment subscription services” as a crime. “Theft” in this case may include sharing your account password, and “entertainment subscription services” refers to things like Netflix or Hulu.com. Also this week, Maria Pallante started her new job as the Register of Copyrights at the US Copyright Office by declaring at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that unauthorised Internet streaming should become a felony.
What is the problem with all this?
For Lobbycrats and Relobbycans
ArsTechnica has a nice little write-up about a report (pdf) that came out in the UK talking about how Intellectual Property law in the UK is based more on lobbying than evidence. I believe the US legislative branch suffers from exactly the same problem. And where this affects me, not being a US citizen or resident and all that, is that they push their legislation onto other countries via trade treaties (google for ACTA, for example).
This is a serious socio-economic problem that tends to get worse. The extent of the lobby influence in US and UK legislation is, quite frankly, ludicrous – a joke to democracy. And it goes beyond intellectual property legislation. Look at the net neutrality debate that has been raging in telecommunications. Or consider the recent lawsuit by several groups against the FDA for failing act against the widespread use of growth-promoting antibiotics in the agricultural industry – an activity that has been known since the 1970′s to give rise to drug-resistant bacteria. The FDA repeatedly put off proper regulation largely due to pressure from agricultural businesses (who consume 80% of antibiotics sold in the US) and the pharmaceutical industry, ignoring its mandate and putting the wider public in danger.
Admittedly, the interests of some industries coincide with those of the general public. And, sure, businesses owners have every right to defend their interests in a democracy. But what is not right is for government and legislation to go directly against the genuine interests of their constituency – to whom they should be accountable to, and who’s interest should always come first – in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of a small minority.
Imperial IGEM’07
Back in the summer of 2007, I took part in the Imperial College IGEM team. We produced a cell-free biosensor for detecting catheter associated urinary tract infections by exploiting the AHL quorum sensing mechanism used by bacterial cells for coordinating biofilm formation. More information can be found in our IGEM 2007 Wiki and in our OpenWetWare Wiki. The over-arching objective of our project, however, was to demonstrate the viability of a cell-free chassis for synthetic biology, based on purified cell extracts. To that end, we created a whole new chassis section in the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
Imperial IGEM’07 presentation at the IET BioSysBio 2008
This was my very first conference presentation!
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Cell-Free Biofilm Biosensor of Catheter related Urinary Tract Infections, Built using Biobricks that Exploit AHL Signalling Pathways in Biofilms D van Swaay Presentation from BioSysBio 2008, Imperial College, London, UK 2008-04-21 12:00:00.0 Electronics Channel |
