The legislature of my state has reached the following conclusions:
1. Taxpayers pay professors to work.
2. Ergo, the research professors produce belongs to taxpayers.
3. Ergo, taxpayers should have access to the research professors produce.
4. Ergo, professors should be obligated by law to place all of their research* into an online open access database.
The problem with this line of reasoning is the following. Academic journals are struggling to stay in existence. It costs money (not a huge amount but still) to print a scholarly journal. Universities increasingly refuse to support academic journals financially. In order to remain in existence and keep publishing, journals have to sell subscriptions. If nobody buys subscriptions, the journal dies.
Is everybody with me so far? Because I’m getting suspicious that this is too complicated for most people.
Since journals need subscriptions to survive, they need a way to ensure that their content is unique enough. If you can find the journal’s materials for free online, would you buy a subscription? How much would you personally agree to pay for a subscription to this blog if the blog keeps offering an open and free access? I’m guessing nothing.
Do you believe journals will agree to the idea that their articles should be available for free online? Obviously, they won’t. There is no possibility that a library will agree to pay a subscription to a journal whose content is easily available for free on the Internet. There is also no possibility that a library can justify such a bizarre purchase, especially given that library funding is getting slashed everywhere.
So obviously, journals will not agree to sign a permission for me to place my article that the journal published online. So obviously, I should either stop trying to get published or resign myself to breaking state law. Neither alternative seems enormously attractive.
The problem that this law is trying to solve doesn’t exist. Taxpayers who are so desperate to read my research could simply request a copy of my article from the library. Or they could contact me directly since my contact information is publicly available. There has never been a single complaint from a single taxpayer who was dying to read my article on a novel by the Spanish writer Galdós and was suffering for lack of access. If such a taxpayer exists, please point her in my direction and I will make her a happy woman.
Every time when an article is published in a prestigious scholarly journal in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, etc. and is signed by “Prof. Clarissa Bulochkina, University of Koompi-Loompi”, this helps Koompi-Loompi to get noticed as a place where high-quality research is conducted. As a result, the value of the degrees awarded by Koompi-Loompi grows. Taxpayers benefit from getting more valuable degrees. Am I explaining this process clearly enough, or is my argument too academic?
Bulochkina gets published, Koompi-Loompi wins. Bulochkina doesn’t get published, Koompi-Loompi loses. Does it make sense to hurt Koompi-Loompi’s chances of generating a positive image in order to solve a problem that does not exist?
Instead of this imaginary problem, Koompi-Loompi has a real one: its name isn’t well-known, especially not in the context of scholarly excellence. Bulochkina’s “spectacular record of publications” (according to her dean at Koompi-Loompi) helps solve that problem. Should we prevent Bulochkina from getting published? Will that somehow advance the interests of the state where she works?
“We need to embrace this as the trend of the future!” joyfully proclaimed an administrator who, in his entire life, has read less than I have published.
Continue reading “Why Professors Should Stop Doing Research”