Why science isn’t free
By: Malte Borggrewe
Tags: Academia, Research, Careers, Science, Publishing

Last week, I heard an inspiring talk by a chief editor of a scientific journal, which was about where and how to publish your research. What was puzzling me for a long time was why published research is often not accessible for everyone, unless you pay a decent amount of money. Isn’t it a bit strange that research which is financed by governmental or charity institutions (and hence by you) ends up in journals that publish behind a paywall? Frankly, it is an intangible concept that research is published this way, but I will try to explain why and how it may change in the future.

As an example, let’s pretend there is an up and coming principal investigator (short: PI), who just started to setup her own lab. The most important resource to open up this lab is money. Science is a very expensive business and can only survive and thrive with a steady income of money. This money comes from you. Part of the taxes you pay are used by governmental institutions to finance research, e.g. the NIH in the USA. Furthermore, charity organisations get their money from donations and distribute this money to research labs. The big question is: which lab gets what kind of money?

Our fictional up and coming PI will apply for this money by writing grant applications. That is actually one of the main tasks of each and every PI, no matter how long he/she is in business. Writing grants not only takes up immense amount of time, but are frequently also rejected. If a grant is granted (apologies for this pun) depends on the novelty and quality of the research, and the reputation of the PI.

Reputation mainly comes down to publications, and not the quantity of publications, but the quality. Hence, our up and coming PI wants to publish in highly renowned journals to get a good reputation to get more money to do more and better research to publish in better journals to get more money to … you get the concept.

Prestigious journals include nature, science, cell, and others. These have very high impact factors, which describes the number of citations that one publication gets on average. More citations equals higher impact which means better reputation for the journal. Therefore, our PI therefore needs publications in these high impact journals, in order to get steady income from grants. This principle is pivotal because journals can demand basically anything, since scientists will publish there anyway. Thus, it is not surprising that journals can charge scientists for publishing, and charge the general public for reading the research.

Fortunately, open access options are gaining increasing attention. Open access publishing of research means that it is accessible at no charge for everyone. Just like open source software. However, since journals are businesses, they need to get an income somehow. Hence, publishing open access often comes with exorbitant charges for scientists (up to a few thousand euros), or for universities. Specific open access journals become increasingly popular, however, they usually have lower impact. Yet, universities are discussing open access options with journals more and more, which is why we will hopefully have free access to all science in the future.

Let’s hope that once our fictional up and coming PI makes it to the top, we will be able to read her research — and all other research — with pleasure, and for free.