Life of a Lab Rat

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and it's not the curry I had for tea.

There is a rather smug editorial in the current Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (full text requires subscription). The editor bemoans the inconsistency of individual publishers with regards to their open access policies. Nature, naturally, is beyond reproach:

By comparison, all journals published by the Nature Publishing
Group [. . .] encourage deposition of
the authors' versions of accepted papers (the unedited
manuscripts) in PubMed Central, in institutional repositories and
on authors' personal websites, six months after publication.

In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, who funds you can determine when your articles become freely available, and how much money the publisher makes out of you. For example, come September the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will pay Elsevier up to US$1,500 for the privilege of making each piece of publicly-funded research freely available six months after publication. If you are fortunate to hold a Wellcome grant, you are required to make your published articles freely available immediately upon publication (fair enough; after all, the public paid for it in the first place). But if you are publishing in any of the ten Cell Press journals (all owned by Elsevier), it will cost the Wellcome US$5,000 per article.

Because the public has already paid for the research to be done, it strikes me as odd that the public (through the charity, Wellcome) has to pay again to see the results of that research. But that in itself, though screwy, is not the half of it.

Elsevier is the science and medical publishing arm of Reed Elsevier. Incidentally, they are notorious for setting high prices for access to their academic journals and services, and being generally restrictive with regards to open access.

Reed Elsevier publishes the Journal of Molecular Biology — a good place to publish technically sound work that maybe is not all that exciting (where 'exciting' is defined at the Nature editorial team meeting each week). They also publish the Lancet, a rather well-known and respected medical journal. Reed Elsevier also funds arms fairs.

Now, I don't want to argue about the necessity or otherwise of arms fairs, nor the the effectiveness or morality of cluster bombs and anti-personnel devices. Those are irrelevant. What is important to realize is that by publishing science or medical research in any of the Reed Elsevier journals you are contributing to the profits of arms dealers. Three times per article in fact: Once when you publish (through page charges), once when you or your library subscribes, and once more when Wellcome or whoever funds you pays them to release your article to the public.

Each time a Wellcome-funded scientist publishes in Elsevier journals, the publisher makes three to five thousand US dollars, for doing nothing. That's profit. And this is profit for the same company that actively promotes the sale of weapons all around the world. Let me put that another way: The largest medical charity in the world is funding the manufacture and distribution of cluster bombs.

And that, my friends, stinks.