The Case for Ending Closed Academic Publishing

21 Mar

A few commercial publishers publish a large chunk of top flight of academic research. And earn a pretty penny doing so. The standard operating model of the publishers is as follows: pay the editorial board no more than $70-$100k, pay for typesetting and publishing, and in turn get copyrights to academic papers. And then go on and charge already locked in institutional customers—university and government libraries—and ordinary scholars extortionary rates. The model is gratuitously dysfunctional.

Assuming there are no long term contracts with the publishers, the system ought to be rapidly dismantled. But if dismantling is easy, creating something better may not be. It just happens to be. A majority of the cost of publishing is in printing on paper. Twenty first century has made printing large organized bundles on paper largely obsolete; those who need it can print on paper at home. Beyond that, open source software for administering a journal already exists. And the model of a single editor with veto powers seems anachronistic. Editing duties can be spread around much like peer review. As unpaid peer review can survive as it always has, though better mechanisms can be thought about. If some money is still needed for administration, it could be gotten easily by charging a nominal submission tax, waived where the author self identifies as being unable to pay.