Nicht einmal Harvard kann sich noch alle akademischen Veröffentlichungen leisten

Techdirt:

Between 1996 and 2010, journal subscription prices rose at four times the rate of inflation. The result is that each published paper now costs the academic world more than $5000. Prices are so extreme that even Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world, recently declared that it can’t afford to keep paying all its subscriptions. Not only can the public which funded the work not access it: often, neither can the researchers who need it as a basis for new work. It’s insane. Academic publishers have made themselves the enemies of science.

[..]

Harvard’s memo about being unable to pay subscriptions included a list of nine things its staff, students and librarians could do to change the current publishing system. The second is key: „submit articles to open-access journals … move prestige to open access“. PeerJ, along with PLOS ONE and other new open-access initiatives such as eLIFE and The Open Library of Humanities offer top-quality options for publishing research. Now it’s up to researchers to use them.

Mit PeerJ wird in dem Artikel ein neuer auf Open Access setzender US-Publisher näher beschrieben, der versucht, das grotesk kaputte System zu verändern. Einer der Investoren von PeerJ ist Tim O’Reilly.