- Academic publishing is a $25.2 billion-a-year business, and profit margins reach 35-40 percent.
- There is a growing movement against the academic publishers' exploitation of the scientific community.
- Aside from acting as arbiters of quality, academic publishers don't really contribute anything to the science.
How would you characterize scientists as a whole? Greedy, self-serving, elitist people who got into the game in order to tack a couple zeroes on their paychecks, right?
Unless you have a personal vendetta against scientists, you probably don't think that. If anything, most scientists are the opposite. Science is hard, and you typically don't become a scientist unless you have a passion for research, discovering new things about the world, and seeing that research implemented in a way that improves society.
There is, however, a lot of money to be made in academic publishing. Academic publishing is a $25.2 billion-a-year business, and profit margins reach 35–40 percent. For comparison, Walmart's profit margin is 3%. Unfortunately, that money comes at the expense of scientific progress.
Why academic publishers make so much money
Publishers act as gatekeepers to research, ostensibly to ensure that only high-quality articles become part of the scientific record. This is necessary — bad science shouldn't be widely disseminated. The problem is that academic publishers don't make their money by preventing bad science from being published. Instead, their paychecks come from preventing people from accessing good science.
As part of the growing movement against the academic publishers' exploitation of the scientific community, researchers and filmmakers have teamed up to create Paywall, a documentary exposing these unfair practices, their history, and how to make research open access. You can watch it yourself below or read on for some highlights.
The cost for a university library to subscribe to a publisher's catalogue can run higher than $2 million, and if you're not affiliated with a large institution that can afford a bill like that, you're out of luck. Researchers need to review hundreds of articles per year, often in different individual journals. Even if a researcher doesn't subscribe to a publisher's entire catalogue, subscribing to individual journals can quickly rack up many thousands of dollars in subscription fees.
You might think this problem only affects scientists. However, most of the costs associated with this issue are placed on the shoulders of taxpayers. Forty-four percent of scientific funding is public, and a portion of these funds must go to academic publishers in order for researchers to access the articles they need to conduct their work. Even if you're a researcher working for a university, the money needed to pay for academic subscriptions comes from tuition fees or government subsidies.
What's worse, there's a hidden cost associated with paying subscription fees. If these were more reasonably priced or even free, who's to say how many more researchers would be working to the betterment of society? We also pay in the scientific progress lost due to the closed access publishing model.
Since academic journals are the only way for scientists to get their research read, they give their research to journals for free. Sometimes they even pay a fee! Publishers then charge astronomical fees for the products they received for free, which is how they can obtain profit margins that even exceed those of tech giants like Apple and Amazon.
Aside from acting as arbiters of quality, academic publishers don't really contribute anything to the science. They actively work against the dissemination of research to the public, and they're rewarded handsomely for doing so. None of these rewards go back to the researcher. In fact, if you contact the author of a paper, they will most likely give you their research for free and be happy to do so.
An alternative to academic publishers
In the digital age, this status quo seems entirely untenable. Anyone who's needed to access academic research but can't pay out the nose to do so is probably familiar with Sci-Hub, essentially the Pirate Bay for researchers. One major issue is that researchers in foreign countries often can't afford to pay for subscriptions fees, which are exorbitant even by U.S. standards. This prompted Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, to create Sci-Hub, where researchers and students could donate articles to be freely disseminated on the web. Currently, Sci-Hub offers 64 million academic papers for free.
- Meet the Robin Hood of Science - Big Think ›
- If the Cost of Publishing a Scientific Journal Article is $10,000, Who ... ›
'The pursuit of Happiness' is a famous phrase in a famous document, the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). But few know that its author was inspired by an ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Thomas Jefferson considered himself an Epicurean. He probably found the phrase in John Locke, who, like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Adam Smith, had also been influenced by Epicurus.
Nowadays, educated English-speaking urbanites might call you an epicure if you complain to a waiter about over-salted soup, and stoical if you don't. In the popular mind, an epicure fine-tunes pleasure, consuming beautifully, while a stoic lives a life of virtue, pleasure sublimated for good. But this doesn't do justice to Epicurus, who came closest of all the ancient philosophers to understanding the challenges of modern secular life.
Epicureanism competed with Stoicism to dominate Greek and Roman culture. Born in 341 BCE, only six years after Plato's death, Epicurus came of age at a good time to achieve influence. He was 18 when Alexander the Great died at the tail end of classical Greece – identified through its collection of independent city-states – and the emergence of the dynastic rule that spread across the Persian Empire. Zeno, who founded Stoicism in Cyprus and later taught it in Athens, lived during the same period. Later, the Roman Stoic Seneca both critiqued Epicurus and quoted him favourably.
Today, these two great contesting philosophies of ancient times have been reduced to attitudes about comfort and pleasure – will you send back the soup or not? That very misunderstanding tells me that Epicurean ideas won, hands down, though bowdlerised, without the full logic of the philosophy. Epicureans were concerned with how people felt. The Stoics focused on a hierarchy of value. If the Stoics had won, stoical would now mean noble and an epicure would be trivial.
Epicureans did focus on seeking pleasure – but they did so much more. They talked as much about reducing pain – and even more about being rational. They were interested in intelligent living, an idea that has evolved in our day to mean knowledgeable consumption. But equating knowing what will make you happiest with knowing the best wine means Epicurus is misunderstood.
The rationality he wedded to democracy relied on science. We now know Epicurus mainly through a poem, De rerum natura, or 'On the Nature of Things', a 7,400 line exposition by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who lived c250 years after Epicurus. The poem was circulated only among a small number of people of letters until it was said to be rediscovered in the 15th century, when it radically challenged Christianity.
Its principles read as astonishingly modern, down to the physics. In six books, Lucretius states that everything is made of invisible particles, space and time are infinite, nature is an endless experiment, human society began as a battle to survive, there is no afterlife, religions are cruel delusions, and the universe has no clear purpose. The world is material – with a smidgen of free will. How should we live? Rationally, by dropping illusion. False ideas largely make us unhappy. If we minimise the pain they cause, we maximise our pleasure.
Secular moderns are so Epicurean that we might not hear this thunderclap. He didn't stress perfectionism or fine discriminations in pleasure – sending back the soup. He understood what the Buddhists call samsara, the suffering of endless craving. Pleasures are poisoned when we require that they do not end. So, for example, it is natural to enjoy sex, but sex will make you unhappy if you hope to possess your lover for all time.
Epicurus also seems uncannily modern in his attitude to parenting. Children are likely to bring at least as much pain as pleasure, he noted, so you might want to skip it. Modern couples who choose to be 'child-free' fit within the largely Epicurean culture we have today. Does it make sense to tell people to pursue their happiness and then expect them to take on decades of responsibility for other humans? Well, maybe, if you seek meaning. Our idea of meaning is something like the virtue embraced by the Stoics, who claimed it would bring you happiness.
Both the Stoics and the Epicureans understood that some good things are better than others. Thus you necessarily run into choices, and the need to forgo one good to protect or gain another. When you make those choices wisely, you'll be happier. But the Stoics think you'll be acting in line with a grand plan by a just grand designer, and the Epicureans don't.
As secular moderns, we pursue short-term happiness and achieve deeper pleasure in work well done. We seek the esteem of peers. It all makes sense in the light of science, which has documented that happiness for most of us arises from social ties – not the perfect rose garden or a closet of haute couture. Epicurus would not only appreciate the science, but was a big fan of friendship.
The Stoics and Epicureans diverge when it comes to politics. Epicurus thought politics brought only frustration. The Stoics believed that you should engage in politics as virtuously as you can. Here in the US where I live, half the country refrains from voting in non-presidential years, which seems Epicurean at heart.
Yet Epicurus was a democrat. In a garden on the outskirts of Athens, he set up a school scandalously open to women and slaves – a practice that his contemporaries saw as proof of his depravity. When Jefferson advocated education for American slaves, he might have had Epicurus in mind.
I imagine Epicurus would see far more consumption than necessary in my own American life and too little self-discipline. Above all, he wanted us to take responsibility for our choices. Here he is in his Letter to Menoeceus:
For it is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men's souls.
Do you see the 'pursuit of happiness' as a tough research project and kick yourself when you're glum? You're Epicurean. We think of the Stoics as tougher, but they provided the comfort of faith. Accept your fate, they said. Epicurus said: It's a mess. Be smarter than the rest of them. How modern can you get?
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.
