Entire library journal editorial board resigns,
citing 'crisis of conscience' (Aaron Swartz)
Taylor &
Francis' final terms asked contributors to pay $2,995 for each open-access
article.
Preposterous. Stupid. Pathetic. Revolting. Authors
need to pay $3,000 to set their own creations free from the grasp of the
publisher? Making big money from old style publishing (merely keeping a
repository of information) is a dying business, and it's about time the
publishers realized that. There is no value in withholding information, and it
makes absolutely no sense at all to make scientists spend a large sum from their
research grants just to give people free access to their work.
In the
1900's, journals were about the only way a researcher could get results
published and spread to a wide international audience. Typesetting, printing and
distribution was a problem in itself, and big publishers helped a lot with that.
Indexing was a big deal that involved manual labor and cost a lot of money.
Publishers provided a useful service and could charge quite a lot for it. I did
research in the 1990's, and I was OK with the system back then. Now, not so
much.
You would think that a publisher would at least take a step back
and think hard about what they are doing when they make it their main business
not to publish information to make it known to a wider audience, but to withhold
information and restrict its visibility to a narrow audience of people who pay
for accessing it.
The world has changed a lot in the last couple of
decades. Publishers, it seems, have not, and they will suffer for it.
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