This post is more focused on a specific policy topic than past ones. I’m trying to experiment a bit with different styles so do let me know if you’d like to read more stuff like this.
On 13 January 2013, Aaron Swarz hanged himself. Two days prior, federal prosecutors in the US had turned down his counteroffer to a plea deal that would have had him serve six months in federal prison for using a crawler to download academic papers. He didn’t distribute them, which is why he was charged with hacking crimes instead of theft. Prosecutors argued, however, that he was planning to make this privately owned scientific information publicly available. This wasn’t so far-fetched. In his manifesto, he wrote:
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access.”
Ever since academic journals were put online, academics have been arguing that research output should be publicly available. After all, unlike regular magazines, academic journal publishers do not pay their contributors or reviewers. It’s a good business. The public pays to produce the research and review it. And then it pays publishers to access it.
When a political movement arises, the targets of its ire try to first destroy it and then to co-opt it. Swarz died during the first phase, when it was still imagined that piracy could be stopped. This dynamic is a whole field of social scientific research and has looked at Corporations and NGOs, war on terror advocates and feminism, the IMF and liberal ethics, post-communist governments and business interests (this last one is very cool, especially if you like social process modelling).
Co-optation involves concessions, which – even if only symbolic – incumbents would rather not make. But today, every researcher has the pirate website sci-hub bookmarked. They also use Researchgate to request copies directly from authors. There are of course also working paper repositories, such as NBER. and, which offer working papers for free. As a result, incumbents have to come to the table.
Journals today have gone even further and become the evangelists of open access. Elsevier and Mendeley bough SSRN and if you look at the July issue of Wiley’s Journal of Common Market Studies, you’ll see that four of the five articles it published are open access.
There’s a catch though. JCMS, for example, charges authors (spreadsheet) €2.667, for which EU-funded projects now pay. This is an unfortunate settlement, incentivised by the kind of influence peddling, as a result of which everybody gets what they want and the public is on the hook.
A national or European science foundation could easily put these publishers out of business by founding competitors which pay all writers and reviewers and offer journals for free. It could also insist on faster turnaround and ensure a livelihood for poorly funded researchers. The European Union should get out of the business of subsidising rent-seeking and instead build a truly open framework for scientific publication.