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From Spencer Graves and RWER current issue To the extent that copyrights and paywalls on academic journals are obstacles to “the progress of science and the useful arts”, there are things that individual researchers, academic administrators, and the public can do to help overcome these obstacles: Researchers can submit their work only to open-access journals and refuse to submit their work to journals that will put their work behind a paywall. (No one who wants to be cited wants their work behind a paywall if there is a reasonable alternative, because the paywall would likely reduce their audience.) Administrators managing research that produce articles for academic publications can insist that their researchers submit their work only to open-access journals. (Anyone wanting to build
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From Spencer Graves and RWER current issue To the extent that copyrights and paywalls on academic journals are obstacles to “the progress of science and the useful arts”, there are things that individual researchers, academic administrators, and the public can do to help overcome these obstacles: Researchers can submit their work only to open-access journals and refuse to submit their work to journals that will put their work behind a paywall. (No one who wants to be cited wants their work behind a paywall if there is a reasonable alternative, because the paywall would likely reduce their audience.) Administrators managing research that produce articles for academic publications can insist that their researchers submit their work only to open-access journals. (Anyone wanting to build
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from Spencer Graves and RWER current issue
To the extent that copyrights and paywalls on academic journals are obstacles to “the progress of science and the useful arts”, there are things that individual researchers, academic administrators, and the public can do to help overcome these obstacles:
- Researchers can submit their work only to open-access journals and refuse to submit their work to journals that will put their work behind a paywall. (No one who wants to be cited wants their work behind a paywall if there is a reasonable alternative, because the paywall would likely reduce their audience.)
- Administrators managing research that produce articles for academic publications can insist that their researchers submit their work only to open-access journals. (Anyone wanting to build the reputation of their research wants their publications to be read. Paywalls and copyrights are obstacles to that.)
- Citizens should demand that their elected officials enact two reforms affecting copyrights:
- All government funded research should be freely available, not behind a paywall, and should either be in the public domain or with a license no more restrictive than the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike (CC BY–SA) 4.0 International license.
- Copyright law should be changed to forbid restrictive copyrights on “works for hire” when they are not actually written with a plausible expectation of receiving substantive income derived from copyright royalties. This would leave in place current practices for publications other than academic journals.
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