I still remember my first visit to a science library: I was a student in the Invertebrate Zoology course and we had to research about vertical migration in marine organisms. I checked Ramón Margalef’s Ecology, made a list of articles on the subject, and went to the university library with full confidence that I would find the articles. The reality shocked me: most of the journals were not available; that day of 1980 I had a hard wakening to the reality of being a scientist in Latin America.
I would later experiment the opposite while doing my Hamadryas butterflies project at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. That was another world; they had almost everything, and if they did not, they rapidly got it from their Washington headquarters. But my period as a visiting researcher ended, and so ended my access to the bulk of the world’s scientific literature.
With time, I developed another strategy. I offered myself as field guide to visiting scientists from Europe and the USA, and got paid in photocopies of the literature I needed. That is how I was able to do my early research on paleobiogeography and onychophorans, so dependent on literature.
As the years passed and Internet became widespread, many university libraries started to pay for online access to journals, but I mostly stayed away from the system because I refused to deal with the terrible bureaucracies that control Latin American science; in other words: the pay-wall still blocks my way to knowledge. More recently, other scientists started to publish about their own objections to pay-walls; for example Curry (2012), Andraka (2013), Taylor (2013) and Browne (2014).
In the case of Latin America, significant parts of research budgets end up in the bank accounts of companies that control pay-walls. These funds could be assigned to primary research if scientists found other ways to access the literature, but I have talked to a few colleagues and authorities, and they all repeated the same slogan: “we cannot work without access to the payd literature”. I do not doubt that they are honest, but, are their impression true?
In my experience, you can do research and publish world class research without paying the fees of $30 to $50 per article that are common; and I no longer rely on being paid in photocopies, I simply write to the authors and -in nearly all casesthey send a copy for personal use. Optionally, I skip those articles altogether: there is often enough open-access material for me to do the job. But I know this solution is not for everyone, and I think that demonizing pay-wall companies is not the best option. For many years they have given science an important service by publishing good research, but they have done so in a way that created two classes of scientists: those with access to knowledge, and those who, like me, cannot afford it.
These companies are now trying to develop a new business model in which they charge authors (or more precisely, their institutions): this allows them to publicly embrace the growing Open Access movement, and still get good profits.
Only time will tell if their new approach works, but in any case they could do far more to make things fair for scientists in poorer countries, and they can start now by applying a model that has worked for decades for some publishers: regional pricing, i.e. researchers with small budgets pay less and vice versa.
Regional pricing is hard to understand for scientists in Western Europe or the USA, who have full access to all literature paid by their institutions, and their monthly salaries are what other researchers receive for a year of work. An example should help: if you are, let us saying, a scientist in Holland, you can earn $ 68 000 per year, but a colleague in Nigeria only gets $ 3 300 for the same work period1. For the African scientists, who often pay from their own pocket, $ 40 to read an article is equivalent to you paying $800 (hence the title of this article). Now it may be clearer to you why the “everyone pays the same” model is so unfair. Finally, there are unethical relationships between publishers and institutions, that I will not detail here (Bohannon, 2014).
In summary, there is still much room for improvement in the way that you, paywall owners, treat institutions and scientists. A fair and transparent regional pricing scheme is a first step that not only will benefit science and the small countries that most need it, but that in the long term can make all the difference for the future of your own companies.