Australian academics seek to challenge 'web of avarice' in scientific publishing

The academic publishing industry is a “gigantic web of avarice and selfishness”, an eminent public health professor has said, as Australian academics seek to challenge the domination of a few publishing houses over scientific research.

Emeritus professor Stephen Leeder was sacked by the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) in April after challenging a decision to outsource some of the journal’s functions to the world’s biggest scientific publisher, Elsevier. This month he will address a symposium at the State Library of NSW where academics will discuss how to fight what they describe as the commodification of knowledge.

Leeder told Guardian Australia he still felt “pretty beaten up” by the MJA experience, knowledge and scholarly information had gone from being a public good to a “commercial, tradable commodity”.

“The whole academic publishing industry is a gigantic web of avarice and selfishness, and the academic community has not engaged to the extent it perhaps should have to stop it,” Leeder said.

“Scholarly publishing is a bit like the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. It’s not totally clear what the hell is going on, but you can be sure someone is making a hell of a lot of money from it.”

Alex Holcombe, an associate professor of psychology who will also be presenting at the symposium, said the business model of some of the major academic publishers was more profitable than owning a gold mine.

Some of the 1,600 titles published by Elsevier charged institutions more than $19,000 for an annual subscription to just one journal. The Springer group, which publishes more than 2,000 titles, charges more than $21,000 for access to some of its titles.

Holcombe said it was unreasonable for institutions like universities to pay such fees to access research that taxpayer dollars had often helped to fund, for example through government grants. The fees publishers charged the public to access research, sometimes more than $50 for a single article, far exceeded the costs of publishing them online, he said.

“The mining giant Rio Tinto has a profit margin of about 23%,” Holcombe said.

“Elsevier consistently comes in at around 37%. That profit margin would make [mining magnate] Gina Rinehart blush. Most of it is thanks to the labour of academics, freely given, paid for by the government and student tuition.”

A study published in the Journal of Internet Medical Research last year found that 13% of peer-reviewed medical and science articles indexed by the online archive PubMed could be accessed free. The rest were behind a paywall and required a subscription or a fee to access the full research paper.

Academics may pay to submit to an “open access” journal title, meaning their research, if published, would be freely accessible to anyone, but such titles do not always carry the prestige associated with those held by big publishers. Academics rely on publication of their work to attract future research grants.

Dr Claire Hooker from the Centre for Values, Ethics and Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, who will chair the symposium, said open and democratic sharing of information was a fundamental principle of science. Blocks to accessing this information should concern the general public, not just academics, she said.

“There are people out there who are worried about the effects of medicines, or who want to know more about the evidence informing the health policies that affect them, but they can’t find the answers because they hit a paywall,” Hooker said.

“But their tax dollars are funding a lot of the research that occurs. This is an issue not just for researchers, but for taxpayers, and it’s an issue of ethics and equality as well.”

Many editors, editorial board members and peer reviewers work unpaid for journals.

Compared with the film and music industries, which have seen an explosion of illegal sharing websites, academia has been slow to take advantage of the internet to covertly share publications.

But an article published in March by the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology found it was starting to occur, albeit slowly.

“Various text-sharing platforms distribute tens of millions of documents online for free,” the study found. “However, these are still unknown to most of academia. Only a handful of articles acknowledge their existence in short passages, and no systematic study of the available collections has been undertaken until now.”

Dr Adam Dunn, a senior research fellow with the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University, said this sharing was yet to reach a critical mass, but predicted the advent of a “biblioleaks”, with research leaked online en masse.

About 80% of research papers were submitted under a “green” open access model, Dunn said, meaning authors could submit a version of their paper to a repository such as that of their institution after a post-publication embargo period.

But Paul Komesaroff, a practising physician and professor of medicine at Monash University, said publishing models needed to be made simpler, and that research should be available equally, rather than to some only after an embargo had lifted. Academics could also not be expected to understand the complexities of publishing contracts, which often varied from journal to journal, he said.

“Researchers do research, that’s what we train for,” he said.

Komesaroff said researchers deserved to be reimbursed fairly for their work, which was often not the case in open access publishing models, where authors paid to submit their paper, but never saw any royalties.

“A number of us in Australia are now exploring a number of small presses that aspire to be democratic, and are examining the possibility of setting up a viable publishing model of our own,” he said. “But it is not easy to set up your own publishing house, and that’s part of the reason why researchers continue to stick with what they know.”

A spokesman for Elsevier, Tom Reller, said the fees charged for submitting papers or obtaining articles helped pay for editors, managing peer review, “enhancing the article to make it more discoverable and usable”, and publishing articles “in branded and carefully managed journals”.

“All these activities occur on digital platforms publishers built and continually improve upon – and these activities are not funded by the government or taxpayer,” he said.

Elsevier was the fourth-largest open access publisher, Reller said.

“We have a number of initiatives to provide access to subscription content for free or at low cost for developing countries, patient groups and members of the public,” he said.

• Reclaiming the Knowledge Commons is at the State Library of NSW on Wednesday 26 August, 9am- 4pm.