Behind the Paywall

The standard arrangement in academic publishing is unusual enough that it would be difficult to invent. Research is funded, typically by public money. The researcher writes the paper and assigns copyright to a publisher for no fee. Other researchers peer-review it for no fee. An editor, often an academic, coordinates for little or nothing. The publisher then sells access back to university libraries, funded by the same public money.

The margins this produces are a matter of public record because the largest publishers are listed companies. Operating margins in the region of thirty to forty percent have been reported for the major scientific publishing divisions over many years, which is comparable to the most profitable technology firms and considerably higher than most industries.

The consequence for access is straightforward. A person outside a subscribing institution encounters a charge of thirty to fifty dollars to read a single paper, which makes systematic reading impossible for anyone not affiliated. That includes clinicians in most of the world, independent researchers, journalists, teachers, and the taxpayers who funded the work.

This is the reclassification mechanism operating economically. Nothing is forbidden and nothing is hidden. The material has simply been placed on the other side of a price that most potential readers will not pay, which produces the same distribution as a prohibition.

The response has come from several directions. Open access mandates from funders. Preprint servers, which are now the primary route in physics and increasingly in biology. Institutional repositories. And Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, which provides unauthorised access to most of the literature and has been the subject of successful lawsuits.

Sci-Hub deserves to be described accurately rather than either celebrated or condemned. It is a copyright infringement operation at enormous scale. It is also, on the published usage data, used heavily by researchers at institutions that hold subscriptions, which indicates that the barrier is often the access mechanism rather than the price.

The archive's interest is in the structural resemblance rather than the ethics. This is the Dead Sea Scrolls embargo generalised: material of public importance held by a small number of parties whose interest is served by controlled access, with the restriction eventually broken by someone outside the arrangement who simply published it.

The direction of travel is toward open access, driven by funder mandates rather than by publisher goodwill, and the transition has produced its own distortion. Article processing charges, sometimes several thousand dollars, shift the barrier from the reader to the author. That is better for access and worse for anyone without a grant, which in practice means researchers in poorer institutions and countries.

Neither arrangement is neutral. A reader-pays model excludes readers. An author-pays model excludes authors. The costs are real and someone bears them.

What remains striking is the original transfer. The copyright moves from the person who wrote it to a company, for nothing, as a routine condition of publication, and this has been normal for so long that most researchers do not experience it as remarkable.