Accessing Research on the Web

Research libraries across the country are canceling subscriptions to academic journals, largely for reasons of rising costs. For example, the cost of scientific periodicals, most of which are published exclusively online, has increased at four times the rate of inflation since 1986. The average price of a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal is now $4,044. In 1970 it was $33. A subscription to the Journal of Comparative Neurology cost $30,860 in 2012. Publishing academic journals can be good business; the leader, Reed Elsevier, had a net profit margin of 39% on revenue of £2.1 billion from its science, technical, and medical journals.

Of course, these journals report on research which has been funded in considerable part by we, the unwashed. Congress in 2008 acknowledged that fact when it required that articles based on grants from the National Institutes of Health be made available, free of charge, from an open-access repository, PubMed Central. But lobbyists blunted that requirement by getting the NIH to accept a twelve-month embargo, which would prevent public accessibility long enough for the publishers to profit from the immediate demand.

The issue of accessibility to research is not some academic foofahrah. Access to research drives large sectors of the economy—the freer and quicker the access, the more powerful its effect.