I made the below slide for a talk in 2012 to show that the biggest corporate scientific publishers are outrageously profitable.  But that was 3 years ago. How do they look now? Outdated figures, created in 2012 The 40% figure for Wiley in my original slide at left may have been “overinflated”, as a helpful someone explained on twitter.

I recently published the below chart to document the outrageous profit margins of scholarly publishers in the sciences. This post is to provide the sources for the numbers in the chart.

Most academics agree that most scientific articles should be freely available, but we’re stuck in a system where scientific articles still tend to be submitted to journals that one needs a subscription to read. One way we researchers perpetuate this system is by donating our labor to provide “peer review” of manuscripts that will require others to pay hefty subscription fees to read.

For Open Access Week 2011, which starts today, I’ve made a video, a draft pledging website, an inspirational website, am giving a talk, and co-written a group letter. This post is about the letter. As discussed in my last post, there’s a web-based course called “Responsible Conduct of Research” that many thousands of researchers are required to complete each year.

Academic publishing is stuck in an outmoded system. Most scientific research is paid for by government and non-profit university funds, but high-profit corporate publishers often control access to the results of the research. In this video, we showcased the absurdity of the situation and also pointed towards how to get ourselves un-stuck. There are significant costs associated with what journal publishers do, so we need publishers in some form.

The transmission of new scientific ideas and knowledge is needlessly slow: Flow slower Solution Journal subscription fees Open access mandates Competition to be first-to-publish motivates secrecy Open Science mandates Jargon Increase science communication;

How can we reduce the ability of publishers to charge exorbitant fees to read articles we give them for free? This situation drains university budgets and prevents public access to scientific information. One of many things we can do is referee manuscripts only for open-access journals. Another is to only publish in open-access journals. I’m trying to organize some kind of group pledge to make a stand on one of these or both.

A few months ago when the 2012 Australian Research Council Discovery Project funding rules came out, I was excited to see them putting money into open access publication: But you always have to read the fine print. When preparing my grant application, I discovered that one is not allowed to include publication costs as an item in the budget.

Several academic journals offer fast-tracking for a fee, and I’ve been complaining about it, mainly because it’s hard to see how this policy could be implemented without sometimes giving monied authors an advantage not only in time until publication, but also in likelihood of acceptance. Traditionally, acceptance into a journal was not affected by how much the authors pay, and many of us would like to see things stay that way.

One of the things I love about science is that money can’t buy you admission into a journal. You simply got to do respectable science, as judged by other scientists. Getting accepted by a journal isn’t like getting accepted into a country club or a business deal. Although every system has its biases and science is no exception, at least there’s no actual money being handed over to grease the wheels.