Sharp practice

During my keynote for the Zukunft Personal event in Cologne, I publicly announced that I would no longer publish my work in closed journals. In truth, the last time one of my papers was published in a pay-to-subscribe journal was quite some time ago. I'm not the first academic who has made this stand and hopefully I won't be the last. Many others now only publish their work in open access journals, and I intend to do the same. I will still also continue to write for professional journals and magazines such as Learning Technologies. I'm also going to continue writing these blog posts for as long as people like you find them useful, and continue to come back for more.

But my days of helping to fill the academic publishers' coffers are over.

For a long time I have felt very strongly that some academic publishers are operating a sharp practice by exploiting the goodwill of scholars. Large groups of lecturers and researchers act as journal authors and reviewers without payment, and then the publishers sell this content on to other academics at grossly inflated prices. Other highly knowledgeable academics give up their time, also for no payment, to review and advise editors on the content, and this can be painstaking work - read this by Martin Weller on the real cost of 'free reviewing'. This is not sustainable and must change. The publishing industry should no longer be allowed to operate such cynical, profiteering business models. The content they sell has been given to them for free by exceptionally skilled academics who have spent their valuable time and energy researching and writing their reports. The price we are expected to pay to read the work of our own community is unjustifiable. How much does it cost a publishing house to create and maintain an online journal? The cost of reading journal articles should be reduced or eradicated completely, or academics should vote with their feet. What would happen if we all pledged to no longer patronise the publishing houses in future? What would be their response if we all promised we would no longer publish our work in their journals? Actually, I articulated these very sentiments in What if they threw a party and none of us came? on my blog last year. If all academics withdrew their labour, the publishers would have to think again. Here are some of the facts and figures taken from the publishers' websites:

Taking out a personal subscription of a Taylor and Francis journal can be particularly expensive. Learning, Media and Technology (4 issues a year) comes in at around £70 per issue. Sister journal Technology, Pedagogy and Education (3 issues each year) is much cheaper at £18 per issue. Another T and F journal Interactive Learning Environments (currently 5 issues a year) works out at just over £26 per issue for an individual subscription. Taylor and Francis also offer individual online articles for download at just £21 per copy. Wiley's British Journal of Educational Technology will cost you between £232 (or £403 for the rest of world) for 6 issues. That's more than £38 (£67) for an issue, each of which is on average 175 pages in length. A slightly better deal is Elsevier's Computers in Education journal which at 8 issues a year works out at just £34 per issue for a personal subscription. Why the fluctuation in prices? Only the publishers can explain that one. I ask again, why do publishers charge such high prices for knowledge? If we continue to allow knowledge to be commoditised to such an extent that it is only available to the privileged few who can afford it, we are in effect, perpetuating an unjust society. In the long term, this can only damage the academic community.

Image by Pieter de Vries


Sharp practice by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.