Before Latin mass was abandoned in the late 1960s, the average church-goer got by picking up snippets of phrases and the meanings of gestures.
To Dr Averil Cook, that’s what scientific research is like in the 21st century. The public relies on information to be synthesised for us, trickled down until it is devoid of its origin.
Cook, a clinical psychologist, is lucky. She can access the full breadth of scientific research due to being an adjunct professor at UNSW.
But without the backing of academic institutions and prestigious organisations, professionals – including doctors, frontline clinicians and politicians – are in the dark, unless they can fork out thousands on expensive journal subscriptions.
“In my work, access to research is critical – we’re scientists, it’s constantly evolving,” Cook says. “But most psychologists don’t have the chance to become adjuncts or access journals.
“It’s a source of deep frustration. I need to be kept up date with all sorts of scientific updates but you’re hamstrung if you wait for it to be filtered to you.”
The gatekeeping of research journals needs to be urgently addressed if Australia is to drive innovation, academics have warned, with the nation lagging behind on open access reform.
Australia has produced almost 2m research publications since the turn of the century. But just 43% were open access, with the rest stuck behind expensive paywalls and largely inaccessible to the public.
Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, has placed open access firmly on the agenda before her three-year tenure ends in December.
Her world-first open access model, recently finalised for the federal government, would provide a centralised digital library for all Australians to access research papers free of charge, as long as they had a MyGov account or were in education. It is currently under departmental consideration.
“We’ve set up a crazy system where publishers own and control knowledge and we’ve let them do that,” Foley says. “Researchers give content for free, sign over copyright, and publishers make a lot of money.
“You can get rubbish, nonsense and misinformation online for free but you have to pay for the good stuff. We need to make sure we’re getting the right information out there.”
Journal publishers have one of the highest profit margins of any industry, taking in an estimated $20bn US a year.
Five major players control more than half of the market, led by Elsevier, with a profit margin of nearly 40% – in excess of Apple, Netflix, Google and Amazon. None are Australian, a market composed of small journal publishers that’s been on a steady decline for a decade.
Under the “publish or perish” mentality, academics fork thousands to publish a paper in a high-profile journal, relying on the distribution of their research to maintain positions, reach audiences and attract grants.
Meanwhile, the journals run largely on volunteer labour. Peer reviews are done for free, and editors take small stipends of about $1,500 a year. Some, including Foley, edit gratis.
Then, universities pay millions to access to the journals, despite the production of content being largely paid by research funds. Without subscriptions, downloading a single paper can cost anywhere from $30 to more than $500.
There have been radical attempts to take-down the monopolies. A decade ago, Alexandra Elbakyan, hailed as the “Robin Hood of Science”, set up a pirate “shadow library” in Kazakhstan in protest of the high cost of accessing research.
SciHub provides free access to papers by bypassing paywalls and ignoring copyright, relying on donations and frequently changing domain names to stay operational.
It now serves more than 400,000 requests a day, hoarding more than 84 million papers despite being banned in some countries, sued twice in the United States and sitting on the European Commission’s “piracy watch list”. Its viability, and legality, remains uncertain.
In Australia, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) has taken the lead on negotiating open access agreements on behalf of institutions.
The executive director, Jane Angel, says “double dipping” publishers are the only beneficiaries of the current system.
“Article processing charges are paid by the researcher to publish the article, and then publishers sell the published research to the universities who buy it back for use in the very institutions that have already paid for and generated the research,” she says.
“It’s the people who have that privilege of affiliation or association with an educational [or research] establishment who may have access, or those beyond who have the means to pay.
“If knowledge stays behind paywalls, it impedes the advancement of our country. It’s also a moral question for Australia – is the current publishing model fair?
“Open access is about making us a more equitable society, because it puts information into the hands of everyone.”
Open access rates are steadily increasing – as of 2023, four in 10 papers Australian papers were closed, compared with six in 10 the previous decade. But the country still has not caught up internationally.
There are 134 countries that rank higher than Australia on Curtin University’s open access dashboard, including the UK and large parts of Europe, which have sweeping requirements that publicly funded research be freely available at an additional author fee.
In Australia, just two national funding agencies – the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) – require publications from funded research be made freely available, with loopholes for legal and contractual arrangements. Only half of government-listed universities have an open access policy or statement.
Foley’s model would go further, democratising the system by making Australia the first country in the world to have a single relationship with all publishers.
She says the cost would be low, pooling together Australia’s estimated half a billion spent annually on subscriptions, similar to how medicine is subsidised under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
But it relies on universities, publishers, stakeholders and the federal government to agree.
Elsevier is on board. A spokesperson says they’ve been “working constructively” with Foley and “stands ready to support her vision”.
“Around 20% of Australia’s peer-reviewed scholarly output over the last six years is published with Elsevier,” the spokesperson says, adding Australia’s citations impact is twice the world average.
Vice-chancellors and ministers have also taken a keen interest – though some universities have expressed reservations about how it would impact budgets and the future of librarians.
“This is transformational, but threatening for some,” Foley says. “Publishers are very open to this to build social license. It has potential for Australia to create a competitive advantage.”
In part, a competitive advantage comes down to money.
According to the CWTS Leiden Ranking, the Harvard University ranks first globally for open access to its research (72.7% of publications). It’s also the richest university in the world – bigger than the economies of 120 nations.
The University of Melbourne ranks first in Australia and 18th in the world, with 65% of its publications available to the public and a high output of research (25,769 publications).
The only other Australian universities with open access proportions of more than 60% are ANU, QUT, Griffith University and the University of South Australia.
Foley says it’s not just universities who would win from a nation-wide deal. Leading academic research is also inaccessible to federal ministers, who she says struggle to make key policy decisions without access to the latest literature.
The Productivity Commission’s five-yearly inquiry, published last year, pointed to statistics showing research papers had a limited reach for Australian businesses and policymakers.
“As a society, this is limiting our ability to make good decisions,” Foley says.
“The number of times I’ve spoken about this to politicians and ministers … they’re making decisions on a Sunday night, getting ready for a cabinet meeting … they want to get to the core of the information to be able to understand it.”
Others say democratisation is not so simple.
Nicole Clark, a university librarian at QUT, says diverse-voices need to be prioritised before publisher driven models.
QUT was the first university in the world to have an open access policy, and recently celebrated two decades of its free repository, which holds 74,000 research outputs.
“In large part our open access policy is an equity argument – we have peer-reviewed literature but also theses and non-traditional publications … early versions of manuscripts, artworks, music,” she says.
“That’s not going to get covered under Foley’s plan.”
Cook agrees. She says researchers are desperate for their publications to be open access to reach wider audiences, but it also comes at a cost.
The prestigious publication Nature, for instance, receives four times more downloads for its open-access journals, but article processing charges are $9,500.
“You end up with the top tier providing research,” she says. “You don’t get people like my students who don’t have money to throw away.”
She says it’s “naive” to assume expanding open access will democratise the system unless barriers to the production of research are broken down – which requires investment in early career researchers and people from diverse cohorts.
“Science has been curated by people in power,” she says. “This information effects our lives, the people we see and there’s no way to access it except through a filtered and biased medium.”
Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT’s School of Engineering, says Foley’s model is fundamentally flawed because it enshrines a national debt to wealthy international publishers, who were likely to tack on hefty increases once an agreement was reached.
“Why do Australians have this desire to make Americans rich? It’s the public’s money,” he says, citing Europe and China, which have invested significant sums in building up local journals with open access.
Gregory says Australia should do the same, via a national research publisher funded by universities that could bring struggling local journals under its banner.
“If these were Australian journals, the government could regulate funding and negotiate agreements for open access publishing. Otherwise, we’re going to lose them all [to the big corporations],” he says.
“We need the boat to be rocked.”
