I don't say this enough but one of the problems in academic publishing is how journal publishers are exploiting the academic "publish or perish" imperative to force researchers to hand over the copyright on their research paper.
The journal publishers do not buy the copyright, nor do they fund the research, but because the publishers have a monopoly on distribution, they have all the power and are able to demand whatever they want.
I am not the first to point this out, and there is growing support for the idea that (at the very least) any research funded by the public should belong to the public and should not become the property of for-profit journal publishers. (This is the Open Science movement.)
So when I read that the Trump administration was considering a rule that said all papers based on publicly funded research should be made available to the public immediately upon publication, I cheered.
Publishers, on the other hand, are panicked at the idea that they might lose their monopoly on knowledge.
The AAP published an open letter least week condemning the proposed change. You can read it over on their website. (I would quote it here, but I could not find a clip that wasn't nonsense.)
The tl;dr summary of the AAP's position is that, in order to further the spread of knowledge, they have to ... *checks notes* ... restrict access to it by putting it behind a paywall.
Don't try to make sense of that claim; you might hurt yourself. (Or even worse, you might be able to understand the thinking, which would be even scarier.)
NEXT!
image by gruntzooki via Flickr
You just finished reading Publishers Object to Losing the Ability to Profit From Publishing Papers They Didn’t Pay For (And Research They Didn’t Fund) which was published on The Digital Reader.