The Broken World of Academic Publishing & Ideas for its Reboot
How knowledge became property, and what it will take to set it free.
Academic publishing was once a public trust, a way for ideas to circulate, evolve, and advance human understanding. Today, it’s a $30 billion industry that charges researchers to publish and readers to read, while locking away the very work funded by taxpayers. From century-old relics to cutting-edge discoveries, the walls keep rising around the world’s intellectual commons. Let's define the situation and discuss what we can do about it.
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Overview

  • How to Publish a Manuscript - Process Breakdown (Skit)

  • Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

    • Nobel Laureate Essays

  • How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science

  • Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

    • Information Overload

  • Quality of scientific papers questioned as academics ‘overwhelmed’ by the millions published

  • The Strain on Scientific Publishing

    • Peer Review / Process Issues

  • Nature Needs a Reviewer (Skit)

  • A Billion-Dollar Donation: Estimating the Cost of Researchers' Time Spent on Peer Review

  • Peer Review and Golden Chopsticks - Sixty Symbols

  • Scientists’ suit against top academic publishers lays bare deep frustration over unpaid peer review

    • Open Access Failure

  • Open Access isn't really Open (Skit)

  • Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder - The Scholarly Kitchen

  • The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco.

    • Striving for Progress

  • Nobel laureate Randy Schekman on Elsevier, open access

  • Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act - Wikipedia (2013-2017)

  • Open Access Letter to POTUS 45 (2020)

  • Royal Society sets out plan to move journals to full open access in 2026 through Subscribe to Open

  • Federal Research Public Access Act - Wikipedia (2006-2012)

  • Should Knowledge Be Free?