The Guardian/Observer Continues Its Attack on for Profit Academic Publishers. (April 23, 1212)

John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. His April 22, 2012 opinion piece in the Sunday Observer. While singling out Elsevier and Springer-Verlag, he makes it clear he has the for profit academic publishing sector as a whole in his sights.

If you're a researcher in any academic discipline, your reputation and career prospects are largely determined by your publications in journals of mind-bending specialisation... Everything that appears in such journals is peer-reviewed... Different journals have different levels of prestige. Their status is measured by their "impact factor"... In any major scientific field, success depends on getting your articles published in such high-impact journals, [and] in the UK and elsewhere, the survival of entire university departments depends on the publication records of their leading academics. So academia has become a publish-or-perish world.

Professor Naughton sights as examples of exorbitant subscription costs: "An annual subscription to Tetrahedron [a journal specialising in organic chemistry] costs a university library US$20,269 (£12,600) p/a. And if you want Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, that'll set the library back €18,710 (£11,600) a year."

Professor Naughton then makes the points that the publishers are further provided free of charge, the published material, editorships, and peer review of the material as well as retaining the copyright of the published material.

Finally, Professor Naughton notes the blogpost of Fields Medallist, Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers, the website that it inspired and the Wellcome Trust's founding of a new online journal to challenge Science and Nature as well as assessing what effect open access of publication will have on  its dispensing of funding to grant recipients.

This is the beginning of something new. The worm has finally begun to turn. The Wellcome Trust and other funding bodies are beginning to demand that research funded by them must be published outside paywalls. Some things are simply too outrageous to be tolerated. The academic publishing racket is one. And when it's finally eliminated, Professor Gowers should get not just a knighthood, but the Order of Merit.

When and if the Australian Research Council will join the National Health and Medical Research Council and abandon its fencing sitting posture as regards the free availability of publications resulting from its funding remains to be seen.