I remember the moment it happened. It was a long moment, maybe ten years long. At one point I was sitting as an acting Senator in a major university’s legislature when a presentation was given by the head of the library, asking, begging, people to start publishing in peer reviewed journals that were Open Access. I had spent the morning sorting a list of journals in my field into the categories, 1) keep or I quit; 2) keep if possible and 3) I won’t notice if you don’t keep, but keep anyway.
That was near the end of the moment. Near the beginning of the moment, a decade earlier, I was at a meeting of a small but important learned society, and we were being given a presentation by a representative of one of the dozen or so well established academic publishers that normally published books, but now was starting to publish journals.
“Let us publish your journal,” they said. “It will be cheaper and easier than what you have now,” they told us. “If we publish your journal, for the next five years, your members will have subscriptions that will be discounted way below what they pay now,” we were led to believe.
I voted against the academic press taking over our journal, but I lost that vote. That journal now costs hundreds of dollars a year instead of fifty. That press was one of many convincing self-publishing and organically Open Access learned societies to encompass the commercial mode, and eventually, that press and all the others were purchased by companies that grew larger and larger as they ate the entire industry. Now, the cost of accessing commercially produced publications is so high it is forcing libraries to provide much more limited services to their constituents.
The new form of Open Access, commercial Open Access, came along and started to offer a different model. We give pay them up front for publishing a paper, and they don’t charge anyone to read it later. The practice became codified when major granting agencies required that project budgets include a line item for such payments, and at the same time, required that research be published Open Access in order to get the grant to begin with.
But the pirates were not confined to the large and ever growing publishing companies. Pirates opened up Open Access companies as well, and one of the things those pirates did not need was quality. They published, along side regular peer reviewed papers of quality, crap that they only printed because they were paid to do so.
Meanwhile, people, regular people who were often indirectly paying for all this research either via taxes or products they bought, were not able to see the research, and many scholars, especially independent scholars, were unable to access the non Open Access work because the costs were so high. Open Access publishing did not solve the problem, and, unsurprisingly, corporate greed kept a stranglehold on the system.
Somewhere along the line ResearchGate emerged. This is a social networking site on which scholars, especially scientists, exchanged papers and collaborated. It is the largest virtual collaborative effort ever formed in the scholarly world. It is imperfect, often annoying, and somewhat elitist. But it is a way that papers are exchanged, including papers published in proprietary journals. These papers are available from the original publishers, of course, but only for very expensive subscriptions, or for one time fees, per papers of something $30-$65 or so. (Note: A given research project may require having copies of hundreds of papers.)
ResearchGate is clearly a thorn in the side of the big pirates, er, I mean, publsihers. And that is probably why “[s]cholarly publishing giants Elsevier and the American Chemical Society … filed a lawsuit in Germany against ResearchGate,… alleging copyright infringement on a massive scale. The move comes after a larger group of publishers became dissatisfied with ResearchGate’s response to a request to alter its article-sharing practices,” according to a report in Science.
Several publishers are lined up to fight ResearchGate, but those two giants decided to take a more aggressive route than the others, and are bringing this matter to court. The others are planning take down notices, and have been engaged in other attempts to quell ResearchGate’s activities.
Jon Tennant, communications director of professional research network ScienceOpen (also an STM member) in Berlin, believes ResearchGate will lose the court battle. “The consequences of this could be variable, from losing some of its data corpus—the infringing articles—to being asked to pay for damages,” he says. Guido Westkamp, an intellectual property professor at Queen Mary University of London, notes that the decision’s effect “would usually be limited to Germany and would not [be] enforceable in the U.S.”
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