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The fruits of academic research mostly take the form of articles that are published in specialised journals. The majority of these journals are owned by a small number of commercial publishers, who benefit from public money to achieve record profits. This situation is detrimental to research and calls for a systemic change. The open-access movement has partially succeeded in promoting better practices, but it has not managed to fight the monopolistic control of these companies. Meanwhile, the digital revolution has permitted the development of fair alternatives that can be the seeds of a new global model. This report is aimed at scholars, politicians, and institutions willing to take action to make the necessary shift happen. In the first chapter, the report reviews the history and current status of the academic publishing system. In the second chapter, it proposes a series of recommendations, based on concrete examples of solutions that have already been tested.
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but one of their recommendations in the intro is for institutions to stop subscriptions to anything but diamond open access journals. I would love to be able to do that, but i worry that too much research is still published in the bad journals and it would hurt our lab’s ability to do high impact science.
This calls for some quantitative research: What is the critical mass of open access publications in some area from which it becomes feasible to fully boycott closed access research?
Or maybe we don’t have the suitable tools for that task: Do we need a copyleft (or rather “citeleft”?) mechanism for scientific publications?