The Open Access movement is a relatively recent development where scientists argue that the papers they publish should be free for all to read. In turn, the publishers argue that they provide a useful service in the form of editing and peer-review that costs money and should be compensated. Elsevier, for example, gets compensated to the tune of 10B dollars a year.

Open Access advocates, of which I am one, use a common argument to support their cause for a free publication system. This argument usually goes like this: The work that I am publishing has already been paid for by the taxpayers and the granting institution, therefore the publishing should be free. That, of course, is bullocks and obscures the real reason why scientists want their work to be free.

Many things that the taxpayers and government pay for are not free. For example, taxpayers pay for that F16 flying sorties above Baghdad. Can I then go to Andrews and request a free joy-ride on the F16 because my taxpayer dollars paid for it? I think the government may have something to say against that. You can argue that the F16 is a “thing” and science is knowledge, but I can’t look at the blueprints for the F16 either. I can’t even see the results of most tests on failed materials NOT used to make that F16. Here’s another interesting tidbit: very few executives or employees of for-profit companies funded through the same NIH dollars (through SBIR) want their work to be free and available in the public domain.

So what is the real reason why authors in academia want their work to be free after publication? From the point of view of the author, having the publisher charge for their work does not bring them any additional value. In fact, it is detrimental to the notoriety of that work as paid access decreases the number of people that could potentially read the publication.

So why do authors still publish in Nature, Science, Cell and other journals that do not put the manuscripts up on the web for free? The answer is simple. The authors want their cake and eat it too. They want the branding of Nature that brings attention, validation and readers. In fact, many academics are afraid that if they publish in an open access journal like BMC or PLOS, their work will be “lost” in the shuffle of millions of papers that are published each year.

Of course, the big-name journals are less than genuine as well. The real “value” that they provide is not the editing and peer-review as they often claim. The value that they provide is marketing. The publishers are paid to reject. Journals are often considered to be better if they reject more manuscripts. Rejection of everyone’s manuscript but their own allows authors to feel like they belong to an exclusive club. Memberships in exclusive clubs, as many companies have proven time an again, is worth money.

I think that proper understanding and adoption of Open Access will come only after we begin a dialogue where the authors and publishers are honest about the value they extract from each other. I will argue in my following posts that, in fact, the value of the brand is far less than the cost of limiting access to your work.