The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing
One company is changing the way research papers are being shared, but professors worry about trusting the for-profit website.
Richard Price always had an entrepreneurial bent. He started a cake business in his mum's kitchen during a summer break from his doctoral program at Oxford, eventually converting it into a sandwich-delivery service after realizing people only ate cake once a week. Then, when one of his philosophy papers took three years to get published, Price channeled his business interests into a new venture aimed at streamlining that academic process.
After finishing his DPhil (the English equivalent of a Ph.D.), Price raised venture capital in London and moved to San Francisco to start Academia.edu in 2008. On this site—which includes a social-networking function and allows users can “follow” others with similar interests—academics post drafts of papers, lecture notes, conference speeches, and published articles. With roughly 30 million registered users, 8 million uploaded papers, and 36 million unique monthly visitors, it has become the one of the most widely used websites to read academic research for free.
But lately, some have questioned whether academics should entrust their research to this for-profit website. And while there is a growing commitment to open-access research, there’s little consensus about the best way to achieve that goal. Traditionally, most of the research produced at American universities hasn’t been accessible to the general public. To read a scholarly paper on leukemia or political theory or Jane Austen, you needed a university ID card or you had to pay roughly $10 to $30, even if that paper was directly or indirectly funded with taxpayers dollars. Those paywalls essentially siloed research in the Ivory Tower.
The convoluted profit model behind academic publishing frustrates many within higher education, too. Subsidized by their universities, professors write, evaluate, and edit scholarly research—work that they largely do for free but can be essential for job security and promotions. And under that profit model, those same universities often pay publishers and database companies billions for access to the very research that their faculty produced. As I wrote in The Atlantic in 2012, this is not a rational process. While new, online journals (like the American Political Science Association’s proposed open-access publication) circumvent the traditional publishers, the most prestigious periodicals for the most part still use this model.
Paywalls and the costs of academic publishing have helped drive the open-access movement, which has gained momentum since Aaron Swartz hacked into the MIT mainframe in 2010 and downloaded 4.8 million academic articles from the JSTOR database. Now, the government requires that all research funded with National Institutes of Health grants be listed on PubMed, which is free to access, within a year of publication. The National Science Foundation is slated to have a similar requirement soon. The British government has ordered even broader mandates. Several private grantees, including the Gates Foundation, also have open-access Is Academia.edu Improving Access to Professors' Research—or Is It Just Profiting From It? - The Atlantic: