Scholarly Publishing Is Broken. Here's How To Fix It.

By Jon Tennant/Aeon

The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple's treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 percent of the global corpus of research knowledge is "open access," or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Recently, Springer Nature, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, had to withdraw its European stock market flotation due to a lack of interest. This announcement came just days after Couperin, a French consortium, cancelled its subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, after Swedish and German universities cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions to no ill effect, besides replenished library budgets. At the same time, Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub, a website that provides free, easy access to 67 million research articles. All evidence of a broken system.

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