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Journal of Science Policy & Governance | Volume 18, Issue 01 | March 24, 2021

Op-Ed: Toward a Sustainable Model of Scientific Publishing

Keywords: scientific societies; publishing grants; open-access; impact factor; publication; community
Executive Summary: The current models of commercial publishing of scientific research costs universities, funding organizations, and governments billions of dollars in the form of annual subscriptions and publishing charges. Yet, many research papers are behind a paywall for the public and those unaffiliated to universities. Much of the research that is freely accessible to everyone requires authors to pay an unreasonable fee leading to inequalities in knowledge dissemination based on affordability. So, we need a sustainable model of scientific publishing that is beneficial to scientists, universities, and the public, especially in light of Covid-19 pandemic related budget cuts. Similar to commercial publishers, many scientific societies publish their own journals. Funding sources and universities should offer publishing grants or annual contributions to fund such societies’ open-access journals and thus support a sustainable publishing model wherein profits generated from academic publishing are invested back into the scientific community. Funding sources should also mandate publishing papers in society journals. To encourage that, hiring committees should place more importance on the article-level metrics than journal quality metrics such as the impact factor. The societies can use the publishing grants to cover journal publication costs and pay commercial publishers only for their value-added services such as manuscript handling and hosting the content online. The proposed publishing model will be sustainable and can strengthen scientific communities by supporting scientific society journals and making science more accessible.

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Ravindra Palavalli-Nettimi is a post-doctoral research associate at Florida International University. Ravindra received his Ph.D. from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He studies insect vision, flight, and navigation.
 
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all the instructors and organizers of the Science Policy and Advocacy Certificate Program for STEM Scientists (UC-Irvine/JSPG). Thanks to Max Schneider and Ankita Arora for their feedback on earlier drafts of the article.
DISCLAIMER: The findings and conclusions published herein are solely attributed to the author and not necessarily endorsed or adopted by the Journal of Science Policy and Governance. Articles are distributed in compliance with copyright and trademark agreements.

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