The academic publishing business is a scam and everyone knows it. Online access is characterized by zero marginal cost so that marginal cost pricing would imply free access to peer-reviewed research. Of course, that’s not how the business works. Instead, publishers price journal access to maximize value extraction from those with the highest ability and reason to pay — universities and other deep-pocketed, institutional “heavy users.” As a consequence, everyone outside the greater Ivory Tower is effectively priced out. Although tempered by the everyday communism of the haves and the have-not’s — not to mention the existence of, shall we say, IP-insulting websites — this structure cannot fail to have a significant retarding effect on research. I have long been in favor of a wholesale revolution in the publishers’ business model.
The White House just upended the game with what looks like an executive order. (Legal experts may not call it an EO). Alondra Nelson, the head of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, is the hero of the story. Her memo delivered guidance for
… agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025.
The White House. August 25, 2022.
Specifically, the memo orders “all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research” be made “freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication”; in “machine-readable” format where appropriate; and by 2025 at the latest. That is, the executive is instructing public agencies to ensure that the fruits of publicly-funded research are made freely-available online in the administrative-state version of ASAP.
I don’t know the exact financial details, but this is surely a death sentence for the warm, fuzzy, crony old world of the research publishing houses. Elsevier’s stock price fell by 6 percent today, twice as hard as the broader market. Perhaps only the smart money has moved fast enough and we should expect the stock to fall considerably more from here. (This is not investment advice.)
The losses of the publishing houses are outmatched astronomically by gains in the “consumer-intellectual surplus” of hundreds of millions of researchers world wide. This single innovation may, all by itself, perceptibly accelerate productivity growth over the coming decades. We must congratulate the Biden White House and Alondra Nelson on what may, in retrospect, turn out to be the most important policy innovation of the Biden administration.
Being left to read the abstract because the rest costs a packet is frustrating.
So who pays for editing and production? Because those are professions as well. Curbing excess profit is one thing but we need skilled editors.