Why don't universities start more of their own open access journals?

[gravenewworld]

Interesting article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

It does have a point. Why do academic publishing companies run a monopoly on scientific information when much of it is funded by tax payer dollars?

 

[atyy]

arXiv has been open access for years. All major physics journals accept papers posted first on arXiv.

The NIH in the USA has an open access policy which began about 5 years ago: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/. There is a delay in when the paper becomes freely available, but one can still access papers in Nature through the versions deposited in PubMed Central, such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21068835.

 

[Andy Resnick]

I agree with atyy. Also, even though Elsevier has gotten a lot of (well-deserved) bad press, I feel the OP article oversimplifies the situation- for example, what of society journals (American Physical Society, American Physiological Society, etc.)?

There are reasonable courses of action:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html

 

[twofish-quant]

It does have a point. Why do academic publishing companies run a monopoly on scientific information when much of it is funded by tax payer dollars?

Because they can.

Also the monopoly in scientific information is partly the result in "high impact journals". In some fields (fortunately not astrophysics), there are some "must publish journals" and if you happen to own that journal, that's a license to print money. One thing that having a monopoly gets you is money to pay lobbyists so that you get to keep your monopoly.

The NIH in the USA has an open access policy which began about 5 years ago: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/. There is a delay in when the paper becomes freely available, but one can still access papers in Nature through the versions deposited in PubMed Central, such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21068835.

And there was a hellicious amount of kicking and screaming to get that done.

Right now there is a big fight brewing over open access textbooks.

http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/10/05/appropriations-bill-may-strip-federal-funding-for-open-educational-resources/