Details of a building, Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht, Netherlands
The results of research, paid by public money(!) should be accessible to the taxpayer. The problem is that a small group of publishers reigns the world of scientific journals, Elsevier being the largest one. They earn money by publishing journals of which the content is paid by you and me. Thse journals are expensive and we have no access to what we paid for. Libraries, also financed by public money, pay for the subscriptions of those journals. So the taxpayer pays twice and gets nothing.
As soon as scientists start a collective boycot of those unaccessible journals and publish in the Open Access journals (including peer review), the problem solves itself. As long as the researchers stick to the classicas like Science, Nature, the New English Journal of Medicine and the like the problem will never be solved.
By the way, when I was a academic researcher (1981-1995) I always published in Open Access journals using the the taxpayers argument. I even in those old times had my own little website with publications. The university did not like it and I had to leave the university in 1995. Now the universities also saythey prefer Open Access if research is payed for by public money. There is nothing new in the world. Only slow academic thinking.
Have a nice day!
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