Guardian Letters: 
Open access plan is no academic spring


Government plans to change the funding system for scientific publication have recently been aired which suggest that the cost of publication should be borne by authors and that the cost per published article (already smartly acronymed as APC=Article Processing Charge) would be about £2,000.
The Guardian published five letters on this issue today, including mine mentioned in the previous post:

Free access to British scientific research may be a laudable goal, but surely the APC to be paid by authors of £2,000 per article is a misprint – you mean £20, don't you, which I as an academic author could afford? But why should academic authors pay anything at all? They should bepaid for their articles. Furthermore, if the plan is for universities to foot the bill for authors, this will leave an important group of researchers, in sciences and humanities, out in the cold – those who do not have (or no longer have) any university affiliation. This is not the academic spring. 

Dr Tricia Cusack

Free Access but authors pay: this is not the Academic Spring

According to today's Guardian (16.7.12) the British government is about to 'unveil' plans to make science research free to access, but by tranferring costs to authors who apparently will have to pay an 'article processing charge' to publishers of about £2000 per article. This so beggars belief that I have written to The Guardian to check whether it is a misprint for £20 - and why should authors pay anything - they should be PAID to publish. If universities henceforward pay authors' fees, who will pay those of independent researchers, including those who have retired from teaching?

Blog description

Academics - astonishingly - have to write and review journal articles for free, or more accurately, at a cost to themselves (for example, fees for illustrations). So long as they belong to a university they can access articles online, but on leaving, most are cut off from such resources without ceremony, and are then required by publishers to pay £23 for sight of a single article. So publishers and universities benefit from free academic labour, then charge non-affiliated academics for seeing the results. This blog highlights this iniquitous situation and discusses solutions.

Re Comments

Apologies to those who have been trying to comment and failed - the settings were restricted to blogspotters. They have now been broadened, so please do leave a comment if you like.

How a Russell Group University terminates a member of staff

I have worked for a large university (member of the much-vaunted Russell Group etc.) since 1999, full-time then the last several years part-time. There is no longer money for part-timers, so my contract runs out this year. I knew that this would mean the end of the easy access to online research resources on which I have depended for so many years, but the impersonal and uncaring way in which this has been notified to me still comes as a revelation.

And why can't long-serving staff (most of whom do not become Emeritus Professors) look forward to continued links with their former employer by being given research access? They could even give the university some publicity through their publications. 

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR UNIVERSITY ACCOUNT

IT Services has been informed by Human Resources that your Associate
registration is ending on Tuesday, 24 Jul 2012.

In accordance with current University policy, access to any of the
University's computing resources managed by IT Services, will be
withdrawn on this date. The result of this will be that your University
username and password will no longer work and you will no longer have
access to your email account."

Academics don't publish for free - they pay to publish

I have an article being published in a great online academic journal in the autumn. I need to use an illustration for it which although out of copyright is held by a national art gallery. Because I don't have any funding, the gallery has very generously waived the 50 euro fee for reproducing this picture, but I must still pay for the image to be scanned and sent, together with VAT. This is a typical situation. When publishing my book Riverscapes and National Identities the costs to me personally were considerable - and some picture owners charged unreasonable rates, given that the book is not the kind that will ever make a profit.
If you have similar experiences why not comment below?

Durham University offers online research facilities to alumni and retired staff

"Durham University Library is delighted to offer University alumni and retired staff access to JSTOR, working in partnership with the University's Alumni Relations Office. If you’re graduating this summer, sign up to the Dunelm online community to gain access to a wealth of information through one of the world's most trusted and well used electronic collections of academic journals. Covering over 50 academic disciplines, JSTOR offers nearly 1500 journals and often includes the full text of each article."

Alumni and retired staff can register for a Dunelm account at: http://www.dunelm.org.uk/jstor

"Time for academics to withdraw free labour"

at: http://deevybee.blogspot.ca/2012/01/time-for-academics-to-withdraw-free.html