Finally I found some time to see the documentary "Paywall, the business of scholarship".
🎥 https://paywallthemovie.com/
Great job by Jason Schmitt, with plenty of testimonies by different actors from the academic publishing area.
A few reflections👇
1/n
The specific problem with academic publishing market is that you can't go for a cheaper product when your favourites are too expensive.
Libraries need ALL the content.
2/n
Academic publishers have identified very well their customers are not the same group as the ones who pay the bill (libraries, managers).
So customers (researchers) are price insensitive.
3/n
Libraries can't afford to buy one by one all the content, so they are subscribed to -very expensive- packages.
Cons of this, if a certain publisher does not want to be part of the package anymore, it goes off without notice to the subscribers.
And yet, libraries can't cancel their subscriptions. 😠
4/n
Princeton Uni. got a takedown message from Elsevier mentioning few research papers were illegally posted on their websites.
Princeton websites are full of PDFs from Elsevier... Why Elsevier doesn't take down all of them? Clearly, they fear the wave that would come over them if they go against the body of researchers that work for them FOR FREE.
5/n
At Linda Hall library, all the papers are open to everyone, regardless their affiliation to an academic institution, in A PRINT BASED fashion.
Here, the paywall problem does not exist.
6/n
This film is quite old -2018. Yet, end of 2023, the problem of accessing academic papers is with us, and personally I see little progress... The way of assesing science is to blame, but also the individual decisions that hamper the full implementation of #OpenScience.
n/n