Mildly Infuriating

So many people outside of academia are gobsmacked to learn the extent to which academic publishing relies on free labour, and how much they charge.

To publish a paper open access in Nature, it costs almost $7000. And for what? What the fuck do they actually do? If you want to make the data or code you used in your analysis available, you're the one who has to figure out how to host it. They don't provide copyediting services or anything of the like. I'd call them parasites, but that would be an insult to all the parasitic organisms that play important roles within their respective ecosystems.

Perhaps once, they served an essential role in facilitating research, back when physical journals were the only way to get your research out there, but that age has long since passed and they've managed to use that change to profit even more.

Sure, the individual researchers are rarely paying this fee themselves, but that's still a problem. For one, it gatekeeps independent researchers, or researchers from less well funded academic institutions (such as in the global South or emerging economies). Plus even if the individual researchers aren't paying directly, that money still comes out of the overall funding for the project. For the cost of 4 papers published in Nature, that's an entire year's stipend for a PhD student in my country. I'm using Nature as an example here because they are one of the more expensive ones, but even smaller papers charge exorbitant amounts (and don't get me started on how people who justify the large fees charged by more prestigious journals don't acknowledge how this just perpetuates the prestige machine that creates the toxic "publish or perish" pressure of research)

he most offensive bit though is that if you are doing government funded research, then you have to pay an extra fee to make that research available to the taxpayers who funded it. It's our fucking research, you assholes! How dare you profit off of coerced free labour and then charge us to even be able to access what is rightfully ours. France has the right idea here — they have legislation that mandates that all government funded research must be open access. That doesn't solve the root problem of needing to eradicate the blight of the academic publishing industry as it currently exists, but it's a start.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but once I started writing, my rage overcame me and it was cathartic to scream it out from my soapbox.