Academic publishing is stuck in an outmoded system. Most scientific research is paid for by government and non-profit university funds, but high-profit corporate publishers often control access to the results of the research. In this video, we showcased the absurdity of the situation and also pointed towards how to get ourselves un-stuck.

There are significant costs associated with what journal publishers do, so we need publishers in some form. But there’s no need for publishing to involve millions in profits and universities having to pay many thousands of dollars for a subscription to a journal.

In the video, the scientist mentions two of the ways we can move towards journal articles being available for free. First is supporting open-access journals. Most charge authors a fee, but one that is not too much higher than their costs, and the result is that anyone can download the article for free.

Another way a researcher can make an article freely available is by depositing the “post-print” in their university or institutional repository. A “post-print” is the draft of the article after it has been peer-reviewed. After a researcher revises their article in accordance with the comments of reviewers, they’ve got a file that may have the same content as that which the journal typesets and publishes. Although the journal usually owns the copyright to the journal version (after the author signs the copyright form), the researcher still in nearly all cases can take their own file, the post-print, and put it in an institution’s official web repository.

If enough of us supported open-access journals, and deposited our other manuscripts in repositories, then journals could no longer charge exorbitant subscription fees. The reason is that with a high percentage of manuscripts available from open-access journals and repositories, universities would cancel their subscriptions to particularly expensive journals.

It’s not just authors that provide free labor to the publishers. It’s also the academics that review each of the articles. So, as reviewers we can also push things towards open access, by saying yes more often to reviewing manuscripts that will be open access, and less often to those that won’t. If we can get a lot of people together to commit to this, it will make a direct impact as well as let others know how many of us support open access. To organize that, I’ve drafted a website called openaccesspledge.com. It also lists other pledges.