Movement for a Free Academia—literature database
Movement for a Free Academia—literature database |
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Zapata-Carratala, C., Glowacki, J., Martin-Dussaud, P., Franzmann, G., Thomas, A., & van Helden, A., et al. (2022). Against parasite publishers: Making journals free. Hamburg, Germany: Basic Research Community for Physics. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (15/04/2024, 08:28) |
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| Resource type: Report/Documentation Language: en: English Published DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7212922 BibTeX citation key: ZapataCarratala2022 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: Academia-publisher complex Keywords: Publishing, Research assessment Creators: Franzmann, Glowacki, van Helden, Loveridge, Martin-Dussaud, Penz, Thomas, Tselentis, Zapata-Carratala Publisher: Basic Research Community for Physics (Hamburg, Germany) |
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| Abstract |
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Executive summary: "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 openaccess 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. Our standpoint stems from a simple principle: knowledge should be free and accessible to all. To that end, action should take place at the different levels of the research pipeline: At the individual level, researchers can join boycotts of parasite publishers by refusing to submit, edit or review articles in their journals, and choose instead to publish in diamond open-access journals. At the very least, they should refuse to assign their copyrights to publishers and make a free version of their articles available on open repositories. Meanwhile, research institutes, universities, and libraries should consider terminating subscription contracts with the publishers, orient their researchers towards healthier publication practices, and support the creation of free journals. At the funding and policy-making level, it is necessary to reconsider the publishing platforms as part of the whole research infrastructure that deserves steady public funding, step back from using bibliometric indices to evaluate research and researchers, regulate the use of data by publishers, and support a revision of the international law on copyright. This report is the result of one year of research and discussions by a working group of the Basic Research Community for Physics (BRCP). We hope that this report will contribute to the blossoming of a new academic spring." |
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Note that the author order is randomised in the report.
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