Science is not for sale. Let's support and favour open access, non-prdeatory publishing.
There is a heist currently going on. It is one of the most lucrative scams in the history of modern capitalism and yet we don’t often hear about it in the media. Global corporations – like Taylor & Francis Group in the picture below – are progressively enclosing scientific knowledge. By controlling peer-reviewed journals, these for-profit companies are able to exploit the voluntary work of researchers who write, review, and edit articles. Taylor & Francis receive ready-to-be-published papers for free and resell them at a high price, keeping all the profits for themselves. Using their monopoly power, they hold universities hostages, forcing them to pay outrageous fees to access knowledge that is actually produced by university researchers. These corporations bring nothing to science, which they treat as a product just like any other. The only reason why they do it is because it’s lucrative. With journals becoming digital, their costs have gone down but not their prices, which are constantly increasing. Their profit margins are unmatched throughout the economy. This is public money being distributed to a minority of (already wealthy) shareholders, the very opposite of redistribution – money tricking up, not down. These predatory practices are a threat to knowledge, endangering the very fabric of science. In times of rampant climate change, the fight for open access has never been more crucial. Making change happen is already complex enough with antiscience movements, greed-driven entrepreneurs, and environmentally blind politicians. But it will get infinitely worse in a world where all the knowledge we have about the climate (and everything else) becomes the property of a handful of profit-craved corporations. A world where small universities cannot afford neither access to knowledge nor access to the peer-review system (because yes, journals start charging submission fees). This is a Black Mirror future in the making. So, fellow academics. We are an irreplaceable ingredient in science making. We are the ones doing all the researching, the writing, the editing, and the peer-reviewing. We are the ones willingly giving them our time and papers for free. Let us just stop. Let us boycott all corporation-owned, for-profit journals until they pledge to keep all science open-access. Let us favour not-for-profit, free-of-charge open-access journals, and let us invent new ways of sharing knowledge outside of this corporate Ponzi scheme. Science is not for sale. Not now, not ever.