Gershman calls out academic publishing abuses
From TeleRead:
Fresh fuel has been poured on the smouldering open access/academic publishing debate by Samuel Gershman, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Josh Tenenbaum’s Computational Cognitive Science Group, in an online articlefor the Boston Globe. Entitling his piece “The Exploitative Economics of Academic Publishing,” he protests that: “taxpayers in the United States spend $139 billion a year on scientific research, yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public, but also to other scientists. This is the consequence of an exploitative scientific journal system that rewards academic publishers while punishing taxpayers, scientists, and universities.”
As you would expect from such a tone, Gershman comes down very much on the open access side of the debate. Not least as he’s been a victim of the notorious Elsevier takedown notices himself.
“Like many scientists, I provide access to my research papers on my website,” he states. “When I published these papers in Elsevier journals, I was required to hand over the copyrights. Therefore, I had no choice but to remove the papers.”
. . . .
Gershman’s basic argument remains highly critical of the closed-access publishers – and hard for them to refute. “Scientists are providing free labor that benefits extremely profitable corporations,” he states. “Taxpayers are subsidizing these corporations, effectively shrinking the amount of funding available for research. Universities cannot afford growing subscription fees.”
Link to the rest at TeleRead