Despite a limited audience, scientific publishing has become a big business. You see scientific journals increasing on a daily basis apart from the predatory ones. They publish your scientific articles with open access. However, the business model employed in scientific publishing is rather confusing.
Publishing Loop
The scientific discoveries made by the scientists/researchers are funded largely by Government. That research is provided to the publishing journals freely, even scientists have to pay to get them published. The publishing journals pay editors to assess the study in terms of applications, experiments, and grammar. But due to workloads, the editors ask other working scientists/researchers to assess those studies, which is known as the peer-review process.
So in a nutshell, scientists are working hard and then paying for their research to reach the audience, the editors that are getting paid for the work-is out burdened to other working scientists who are judging scientific studies voluntarily. Moreover, due to the lack of funds, if a study is published in closed access, the audience/academic libraries are paying again to gain access to those scientific articles to be read by scientists who created the study in the first place.
What an astonishing business model!? Not even that, I have recently witnessed advertisements on social media networks inviting authors to submit in their journals “with appropriate APCs (article processing charges)“. This scientific publishing business is pointless. The main purpose of scientific discovery is to reach the right audience so that science can grow. Researchers get enough information to generate new models or find astonishing things, not to get stuck in this publishing loop. Alexandra Elbakyan (owner of Sci-Hub) once stated that
Science should belong to the scientists, not the publishers [1].
Problems with Publishing Business
The publishing fee set by some reputed journals is quite high that even some independent scientists would find it difficult to publish their work in those journals. It seems like scientists have become the slaves of publishing journals. As a result, scientific growth hinders leading to fewer advancements in science and more towards the publishing business.
Scientists put all the hard work into doing research and then pay to make it reach the other scientists or pay to get access to the scientific articles to discover something new in the scientific world. It’s a scandal as also stated by the Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen [2].
Concluding Remarks
The publishing of scientific articles should be free of cost. The assessment must be purely on the basis of the significance and outcomes of the study not on the condition of whether the scientists are capable of paying the article processing charges or not.
