The Cost of Knowledge - The Academics Spring

Slowly but surely, and  bit by bit (or should that read byte by byte), fundamental socialist principles - free access - are sinking in.

In what has been dubbed the "academic spring" – is the growing campaign among academics and research funders for open access in academic publishing. They want to unlock the results of research from behind the lucrative paywalls of journals controlled by publishing companies. Almost 11,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of journals owned by the huge academic publisher Elsevier. (see  here). Not only do these commercial restrictions slow down future scientific discovery but they  put up barriers for interested members of the public, politicians and patients' groups who need access to primary research in order to exercise their democratic rights.

Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, says "We face important policy choices on a whole raft of issues – climate change, energy generation, cloning, stem cell technology, GM foods – that we cannot hope to address properly unless we have access to the scientific research in each of these areas."

The government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. Wales is a vocal supporter of free and open access to information on the web and he was brought in by No 10 earlier this year as an unpaid adviser to government on crowdsourcing and opening up policymaking. On open access, he will assist the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the UK Research Councils to develop new ways to store and distribute research data and articles. The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository. The repository would also have built-in tools to share, comment and discuss articles. David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK, which represents academic libraries, welcomed the plans.

 Text mining is a relatively new research method where computer programmes hunt through databases of plain-text research articles, looking for associations and connections – between drugs and side effects, for example, or between genes and disease – that a person scouring through papers one by one may never notice. But the process requires research articles to be accessed, copied, analysed and annotated – all of which could be illegal under current copyright laws. Cameron Neylon, a biophysicist says such copyright rules are problematic. "Firstly, we do a lot of reinventing the wheel because older literature isn't as accessible as it should be. We really need to be running high quality mining tools over the older literature, because there is a lot of value in there. The second problem is that there is so much being generated today that people can't keep up – there is simply too much to cover – and this means that we are getting more and more trapped in the silos of our own discipline and missing parallel work in the noise."

One of the biggest obstacles in achieving full open access for research will be the resistance of journal publishers to changing their lucrative business models. The majority of the world's scientific research, estimated at about 1.5m new articles a year, is published in journals owned by a small number of large publishing companies including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Scientists submit manuscripts to the journals, which are sent out for peer review before publication. The work is then available to other researchers by subscription, usually through their libraries. Publishers of the academic journals, which can cost universities up to £16,500 a year each to access. Most universities buy bundles of journals, however, so they can soon face bills of more than £1m each to access the journals their academics request. Academic publishers charge UK universities about £200m a year to access scientific journals, almost a tenth of the £2.2bn distributed to them by the government, via the funding councils, for the basic running costs of university research. Despite the recession, these charges helped academic publishers operate with profit margins of 35% or more , while getting their raw materials and the work of thousands of taxpayer and charity-funded scientists for nothing. The big three publishing houses – Elsevier, Springer and Wiley – own most of the world's more than 20,000 academic journals and account for about 42% of all journal articles published. And, even as library budgets over the past few years in the UK and North America have been flat or declining, journal prices have been rising by 5-7% a year or more.

Nor are the publishers are not the only hurdle to enabling wider adoption of open access –  and how academics and research are rewarded. Academics are assessed on their publication record in scientific journals and the metrics of the system mean that the more prestigious the journal, the higher the chance there is of promotion or a research grant. This problem is exacerbated by the Research Excellence Framework (REF), an exercise carried out every few years by the UK funding councils to assess the quality of every university department. The assessments, largely based on publication records, determine how more than £2bn is distributed every year to universities. A  paper in Nature, Science, Cell or some other high-impact (but non-open-access) journal will count for far more in the REF assessments than the enlightened notion that scientific research should be as widely available as possible.

"Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research," the universities and science minister, David Willetts said in a speech. "...as the world changes, both cultural and technological change, their [academic publishers] business model is going to change."

The Socialist Party calls for more change! The freedom from patent and copyright restrictions, which are forms of private ownership and will thus be abolished, will almost certainly unlock a tidal wave of new development that may revolutionise whole areas of science. Socialism will allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that can be digitalised and make a new abundance of knowledge possible. Those scientists who currently call for "open access" of research may well be described as closet socialists.