Some research articles are free, and others are behind paywalls. Why? Because it costs money to operate. If you see a research paper you'd like to read that's behind a paywall, any public or university library should be able to get you a copy, because most of them have subscriptions.

Yes it makes sense if your goal is improoving the worlds knowlede and there are a lot of open knowlege platforms and open papers.

But research is expensive and scientists need to bring food to the table too. Someone needs do pay for all that and whoever pays can decide where the results go, if an aerospace industry company is researching on a new material, they do that because they hope to make proffit in the future.

Authors don’t get paid from journals and if they do, it’s barely anything. When you pay for an article, you’re not paying the author. You’re paying the publisher. It’s largely a scam but one that is required by academia.

University libraries, yes, but generally only for students or staff. Public libraries rarely have subscriptions to scientific journals, AFAIK (I've never seen this).

yes that's what i heard as well, and also apart from that authors need to pay for their papers to get published in the first place

Im not talking about the paper but the actual research, the money the scientists needs to pay to the publisher is normaly covered by the employer.

/u/Mastodon996 and /u/Expert-Hurry655, both wrong. If only it were like that.

>Some research articles are free, and others are behind paywalls. Why? Because it costs money to operate. If you see a research paper you'd like to read that's behind a paywall, any public or university library should be able to get you a copy, because most of them have subscriptions.

>But research is expensive and scientists need to bring food to the table too. Someone needs do pay for all that and whoever pays can decide where the results go, if an aerospace industry company is researching on a new material, they do that because they hope to make proffit in the future.

Research is expensive, and researchers do need to make a living (most in academia don't earn particularly much relative to the time/education investment needed to get to their positions).

But the paywalls you're seeing do not fund these researchers and their projects. It is an entirely for-profit middle-man business run by the journal publishers, a model that persists only because they have the power of establishment on their side. Scientists must publish to stay relevant and stay funded, and publishing is controlled by these journals who extract fees from the scientists to publish their work, too. And the peer review process, where impartial experts judge the quality of submitted work before publication, playing a major part in the editorial role for journals? Those scientists aren't paid for their time either. Journals take and take, and make everyone else pay for things they didn't create, with minimal operating costs -- all they have to do is host the research papers, and print some paper copies. The profit margins on this business are ludicrous.

Some countries are attempting to break up this model. I believe in the US, regulations are being put in place currently that force academic work funded by taxpayer money (a huge share of research funding!) to be made available free of charge to the public within a year.

There are also certain fields, mostly around computer science, that are breaking free of this themselves by launching open publication platforms and collectively trusting/supporting them, taking away traditional journals' prestige factor.

Source: am in academia.

It wasn’t that long ago (1990s) that scientists themselves would have to go to the library and photocopy their own journal articles (or I guess if you were a prof, you probably had an assistant do it).

I don’t understand the current business model of journals existing as PDF files mailed around. The purchase price of $35 per article is absurd and no one ever pays that. Big schools do subscribe to the journals their research teams publish in. So that’s how scientists get themselves get access.

If they don’t have to actually print as many physical copies of the journal, it should be cheaper than it was before, but it can’t be free. There are still administrative costs. I don’t know how much the senior editors get paid.

Running a journal is expensive. There are production staff, editorial staff, IT demands (organisation and publishing software), and other office costs. There are also reviewing costs - while the main subject matter is often done by volunteer reviewers, ceraint parts of the review may require paid specialists (eg. A medical journal may need to hire a mathematician to check the statistical analysis).

Traditionally, the way journals were funded was by selling subscriptions to individual scientists or universities and libraries. This is still the case, but there are now so many journals that it is inpossible, even for top universities to keep up. I teach at a med school and while some of the most famous med journals are subscribed to and the library has a login, minor or specialist journals often are not available, and while the library can get a copy it usually costs $20-30 for the request to be sent out to a partner library who does have a subscription and get the article back.

Increasingly, many journals now offer an option where the authors pay to have their article published. So, if yoi write a scientific article, send it to a journal and their reviewers and editor accept it, then you can pay the cost of publication (usually around $1000) and the publisher will make the article "open access (free to anyone).

As $1000 is very cheap compared to a new scientific experiment or study, this is easily affordable by anyone who had the money to do the study. Indeed, many charities and governments which give out money for scientific work, now specifically include a publication fee in the donation, and make it a requirement that any articles published come out "open access".

This was kind of the case before. Emperors and kings would sponsor large libraries where research were made public to anyone visiting. And this would attract a lot of scholars to these cities where they would be learning and then even teach others. The purpose of this was to gain cultural influence, technological supremacy and military tactical advantages. I am not just talking about the ancient Greek and the Library at Alexandria here but these programs were also heavily funded by people like Louis XXIV of France, Cathrine the Great of Russia and is how institutions like the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge were founded and operated.

The cost of gaining this knowledge was that you had to travel to the library and even ask for permission to read the research. But this started to change when printing took off and papers could be printed and mailed to whoever wanted it. But this did of course have fees associated with it. Printing was fairly cheap but still cost money and the postal dues also cost some. So you were expected to pay these costs. Eventually as the peer review process were better established and regular journals were published with the best papers the costs of administration were included as well as the printing and mailing. These made sense and you could usually go to the university library of the authors to read the paper for free.

The issue was when computers and the Internet came about. Most of the administrative and practical aspects of running a scientific journal were gone over night. But the fees still remained as they were. There have been much less focus on reducing these fees then there should be. And the owners of these journals knows this and provides excellent service to the libraries that pay these fees to prevent them from arguing over price. It is just considered the cost of research.

There are quite a bit of push towards open access journals, mostly from political and individual academics rather then from the academic institutions themselves. So we are slowly getting there but it is a very slow process.

Welcome to capitalism, where profits of a few are more important that scientific improvement.

Publishers don't give a s%it if the articles aren't available to everyone, they want to make profit from subscriptions. Authors are kinda forced to publish their papers on the mainstream vehicles, so they don't have a choice.

It has nothing to do with research costs like some people here are saying. Neither the authors and universities get a penny of the subscription money.
However, if you email any author asking for .pdf of a paper/article that he wrote, he'll gladly send you for free, also there are people fighting this, like Alexandra Elbakyan, with scihub (If you don't know her, look it up, here's the transcript of her presentation "Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case of Sci-Hub." https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript-and-translation-sci-hub-presentation).

Most public libraries by now should participate in interlibrary programs that give them access to just about anything, as long as you're willing to spend a few days waiting. At least in more populous states. You'll definitely need a library card though.

Note that the people doing the research and the people doing the peer review are not the ones who pocket all the money made by these scientific journals.

The companies operating the journals make the profits.

This made more sense in the days when everything was still on paper.

One of the people who turned scientific journals into what they are today was Robert Maxwell. He is dead, but his legacy lives on.

You may have heard of his daughter Ghislaine who apparently takes after her father when it comes to ethics and morals.

Yes I can confirm this. I haven’t made a cent off any of my publications. The papers that are available for free are from “open access” programs, where the researchers probably paid a fee to make the work available for free instead of having it behind the standard pay wall. It os becoming more common for funding agencies to require that you make the work freely available.

That said, your public library probably either has or can get any paper you want, it just might take a bit to do an inter library “loan” of the article. Or email the corresponding author. Many (not all) are willing to send you a copy.

In the land of chemistry and physics, ArXiv is a popular way to accomplish satisfying funding agency open access requirements without having to pay the journals extra.

Source: am also in academia

ArXiv is a big one. I'm in life sciences, and we're seeing the same with medRxiv and bioRxiv. For all the harm it did, the pandemic did much to drive adoption of these platforms. Though I feel many people still think of them as more of a stepping stone to that coveted Nature publication, etc.

> It is an entirely for-profit middle-man business run by the journal publishers

Plenty of prominent journals are run by nonprofit organisations - most learned societies have their own journals, for example.

> Journals take and take, and make everyone else pay for things they didn't create, with minimal operating costs -- all they have to do is host the research papers, and print some paper copies.

They also do copyediting, and gatekeeping to keep the cranks out. I agree that there is a lot of profiteering involved, but if the journals were pointless then everyone would just publish on sites like arxiv.

At some level, academics have to take responsibility for this problem. They're the ones who are choosing to pay to publish their work in crappy Springer/Elsevier/Wiley/MDPI journals instead of supporting their own learned societies or setting up their own more responsible publications. They're also the ones who obsess over publications and citations and tell the politicians that that's how they should be judged. This isn't a problem that is being foisted on academia from outside.

> I believe in the US, regulations are being put in place currently that force academic work funded by taxpayer money (a huge share of research funding!) to be made available free of charge to the public within a year.

Yeah, but these policies tend to result in one of two unsatisfactory approaches. Either the academic hosts a version of the paper privately, which often isn't quite the same as the "official" published version and can be hard to track down. Or they publish in an "open-access" journal, which brings its own problems. The open-access model is that you pay a big fee and they publish your article and make it available to everyone. This is basically the same as the vanity press model. Open-access journals have a huge incentive to publish as many papers as possible, and very little incentive to ensure their quality or promote them to a wide audience, exactly like vanity presses. Again, there are plenty of good, non-profit open access journals, but most academics prefer to publish in the endless array of Springer and Elsevier ones.

These are fair points. I agree journals aren't entirely pointless, and that part of the blame in perpetuating this system lies with academics themselves. Watching your new paper doing numbers in Nature is something most would not pass up, even if there were alternatives that are more ethical in this sense. Disrupting that kind of status quo and trusting new platforms is always going to be hard, but I hope the push against the classical for-profit publishers continues.

There main reason is History.

Scientific research didn't begin in the era of the internet. Back in the olden days scientists basically just wrote letters to each other bragging up their latest discoveries. As the number of scientists grew, everyone writing letters to everyone else became too much work, so some folks decided to create a kind of magazine where scientists could write up their discoveries once-and-for-all to get word out to all of the magazine's readers at once, and the idea of the academic journal was born.

Like any good magazine, there were editors-in-chief who decided whether to accept or deny submissions based on if the article was sufficiently on-topic for their magazine's audience and whether the article was sufficiently cool to their audience. So some of those magazines became more famous as reliably having the best and coolest stuff in their respective fields.

Also, because it would cost a fair amount of money to type up all of these submissions, bind them together nicely into a booklet, and distribute them out to the subscribers, this was not done as a free service but rather - like most any other kind of magazine - it was done as a for-profit business.

The system wasn't perfect, but at the very least it was financially sustainable enough (for most of the best journals) to survive to the present day.

In modern times, the internet offers a multitude of ways to disseminate these same sorts of scientific write-ups to vastly more people at drastically lower costs (compared to oldschool paper-based printing and publishing). However, the historical system still has significant momentum due to the best journals still have the biggest audiences and a fair amount of prestige. This leaves academics with a tough decision when it comes time to publish: "Do I publish in a prestigious oldschool journal behind paywalls, or do I publish in some online upstart journal that is free-to-all?".

There are trade-offs to choosing either option. By publishing in a prestigious oldschool journal you are making your work harder to access (essentially limiting it to folks with academic library access) but you also get some bragging rights and free advertising based solely on the fact that your article is published by that particular prestigious journal. On the other hand, publishing in some upstart online journal means that anyone who clicks the link can read your work... but the low notoriety is of no help in attracting people to your paper in the first place.

Ideally, the science should stand for itself regardless of which avenue it is published under, but unfortunately the people doing the science have careers to consider in order to keep doing that science in the first place. So, whether we like it or not, the upfront bragging rights from a prestigious journal publication may be more beneficial to a researcher's career than a free-to-all online journal publication (even if that would be better for the scientific community). Ultimately, this means that publishing in upstart journals is basically a luxury that only already-well-established researchers can risk.

Publicly funded research is freely accessible in most countries. The US is just not one of those countries.

Hint: You can always get an abstract of the research paper, which identifies the author(s). Contact the author(s), and they will almost always provide you the researchpaper for free. (They are allowed to do this.)

Because for profit publishers want more profits.

Some countries are now passing laws to make publicly funded research free, but for now if open access is not available use sci-hub, unpaywall, r/scholar or even email the author directly (many will respond with a pdf of their work). Your taxes have already paid for the research in many cases and the fees do not go to the researchers or the peer reviewers, they just go to publishing companies like Elsevier who add essentially no value.

>”They also do copyediting, and gatekeeping to keep the cranks out. I agree that there is a lot of profiteering involved, but if the journals were pointless then everyone would just publish on sites like arxiv.”

Most of that is done by unpaid peer reviewers. The publishing companies that own journals don’t really add any value they are true middlemen.

Your other points are true, open access journals deserve more attention and prestige, hopefully opinions change going forward, if legislation doesn’t do it first.

This is more often the case with open access journals and a lot of the time the department of the researcher or the grant funding the research will have some funds set aside to pay for this. This is becoming more common, but a lot of the more prestigious journals (where publishing is more likely to help your reputation for tenure or getting more funding) aren't open access, at least not yet. It used to be the case that any journal that required you to pay to publish something was more than likely a scam: a journal with little to no review process that would publish just about anything, meaning most people wouldn't bother reading your research if they saw it published there. Things are definitely changing, but slowly.