Access to academic journals

I couldn't agree with George Monbiot more on this.

A particular concern of mine is that virtually all the research I have published has, in effect, been funded twice by the taxpayer. First in terms of paying my PhD grant and then salary while working at university; second in terms of paying for the surveys (such as the British Crime Survey) whose data I and various co-authors have used. It seems to me that in these circumstances everything should be freely available to the people - i.e. all of us - who have funded the research. And it certainly isn't at the moment, because it's sitting behind pay walls charging at least £30 a throw.

Of course there are various ways to get research out there (e.g. www.academia.edu, www.ssrn.com), but the pressure to get papers in the peer-reviewed journals that Monbiot criticises is overwhelming. It's almost the only way to build an academic career. So, obviously, you always make sure the best stuff is that which the smallest number of people can read it!

There are some ways round this problem. Working papers can be posted on the sites above, or on personal websites. Research reports can be - and are - written for the bodies who funded the surveys used. But in a classic catch-22 these will mostly be unread, indeed uncommisioned unless the author has a reputation built by publishing in peer-reviewed journals.....

And this is before we start to consider that the entire system is built on the free (to the journals) labour of academics as authors and as reviewers. I would hope that in the future we can move toward the system proposed by Monbiot. But I won't hold my breath, for reasons for inertia, if nothing else.

I also think, to be fair to the publishers, they are only really responding to a demand from within academia and from the funding bodies. The current system is almost wholly built on peer-reviewd publication, and the pressure to get published is so strong that almost everyone is working on several to many papers at any one time. These all have to go somewhere, hence the multiplication of journal titles in recent years. Which, of course, don't come for free: at the utter barest minimum, someone has to ensure that the review process functions properly and host a website.

I'm not sure the political will exists to change this situation. Indeed the current UK government presumably prefers that private companies make significant profits from the system, and would be ideologically opposed to switching to something entirely publicly funded.