Research Shows That Published Versions Of Papers In Costly Academic Titles Add Almost Nothing To The Freely-Available Preprints They Are Based On

from the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold dept

The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the high cost of many academic journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies. The high profit margins of leading academic publishers -- typically 30-40% -- seem even more outrageous when you take into account the fact that publishers get almost everything done for free. They don't pay the authors of the papers they publish, and rely on the unpaid efforts of public-spirited academics to carry out crucial editorial functions like choosing and reviewing submissions.

Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they "add value" as papers progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true -- does a bit of sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? -- hard evidence has been lacking that could be used to challenge the publishers' narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just been "officially" published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper's own history demonstrates. The results are unequivocal:

We apply five different similarity measures to individual extracted sections from the articles' full text contents and analyze their results. We have shown that, within the boundaries of our corpus, there are no significant differences in aggregate between pre-prints and their corresponding final published versions. In addition, the vast majority of pre-prints (90%-95%) are published by the open access pre-print service first and later by a commercial publisher.

That is, for the papers considered, which were taken from the arXiv.org preprint repository, and compared with the final versions that appeared, mostly in journals published by Elsevier, there were rarely any important additions. That applies to titles, abstracts and the main body of the articles. The five metrics applied looked at letter-by-letter changes between the two versions, as well as more subtle semantic differences. All five agreed that the publishers made almost no changes to the initial preprint, which nearly always appeared before the published version, minimizing the possibility that the preprint merely reflected the edited version.

The authors of the paper point out a number of ways in which their research could be improved and extended. For example, the reference section of papers before and after editing was not compared, so it is possible that academic publishers add more value in this section; the researchers plan to investigate this aspect. Similarly, since the arXiv.org papers are heavily slanted towards physics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, further work will look at articles from other fields, such as economics and biology.

Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.

If it was felt that more user-friendly formats were needed than the somewhat austere preprints, it would be enough for funding organizations to pay third-party design companies to take the preprint texts as-is, and simply reformat them in a more attractive way. Given the relatively straightforward skills required, the costs of doing so would be far less than paying high page charges, which is the main model used to fund so-called "gold" open access journals, as opposed to the "green" open access based on preprints freely available from repositories.

In theory, gold open access offers "better" quality texts than green open access, which supposedly justifies the higher cost of the former. What the research shows is that when it comes to academic publishing, as in many other spheres, all that glitters is not gold: humble preprints turn out to be almost identical to the articles later published in big-name journals, but available sooner, and much more cheaply.

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Filed Under: academic journals, knowledge, open access, paywalls, pre-prints

The Sad Legacy Of Copyright: Locking Up Scientific Knowledge And Impeding Progress

from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept

We've repeated this over and over again, but the Constitutional rationale for copyright is "to promote the progress of science" (in case you're wondering about the "useful arts" part that comes after it, that was for patents, as "useful arts" was a term that meant "inventions" at the time). "Science" in the language of the day was synonymous with "learning." Indeed, the very first US copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790 is literally subtitled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." Now, it's also true that the method provided by the Constitution for the promotion of this progress was a monopoly right -- locking up the content for a limited time. But the intent and purpose was always to promote further learning. This is why, for years, we've questioned two things: First, if the monopoly rights granted by copyright are hindering the promotion of learning, should they still be Constitutional? Second, if the goal is the promotion of learning, shouldn't we be exploring if there are better methods to do that, which don't involve monopoly rights and limiting access. And this, of course, leaves aside all the big questions about how much copyright has changed in the past 227 years.

Still, I'm thinking about all of this again in response to a new report -- first found on BoingBoing -- noting that 65 out of the 100 most cited papers are behind a paywall. The report is interesting and depressing. It doesn't just point out that these 65 papers are behind a paywall, but notes the price of the article, and what the effective total price to cite really is (which they list as "cost to buy individually").

The web was built specifically to share research papers amongst scientists. Despite this being the first goal of the modern web, most research is still published behind a paywall. We have recently highlighted famous math papers that reside behind a paywall as well as ten papers that have achieved a near rockstar status in research and the public. Here we systematically look at the top one hundred cited papers of all time and find that 65\%65%​ of these papers are not open. Stated another way, the world’s most important research is inaccessible from the majority of the world.

In case you're wondering, the average price to access each article is $32.33 (and the median is $32), with the range being $4 to $41. There aren't too many down around the $4 range, mind you. It's pretty much an outlier. As you'd suspect from the average, most are priced in the $25 to $40 range.

Of course, it's worth thinking carefully about this -- especially in an age where a useful service like Sci-Hub, which has created a library of academic research, open to all, is being attacked as an infringer, with all sorts of attempts to shut it down. Does this really make sense if the goal of copyright is to increase learning? (It's a separate discussion altgoether whether the purpose of copyright was ever really to increase learning, or if that was just a fig leaf to cover over the idea that it was a monopoly right for publishers).

The people writing these academic papers are almost never incentivized by the copyright. Hell, in most cases, the journals they publish in require the copyright be turned over to the journal. The journal, which profits massively from all this free labor, seems to disproportionately benefit from this setup. It gets the copyright. It charges insane amounts -- mainly to a captive audience of universities which feel required to pay extortionate rates -- and everyone else gets left out (or has to resort to infringement). It's difficult to see how anyone can justify this system in an intellectually honest manner.

The supporters of the system will fallback on a few points: they will claim that the journals provide peer review -- leaving out that this is also done as volunteer (free) labor, and there's no reason it need be done via a journal. On top of that, there's the fact that the existing peer review system is a joke that doesn't actually work. Some will argue that the journals provide a level of trust and credibility to papers -- and that's true, even if they still often publish bogus papers.

And, of course, all of this ignores the internet. The internet solves nearly every "problem" that journals claim they solve, and does it much better and more cost effectively. With the internet, peer review can be better and more efficient (and can let in many more perspectives.). On the internet, distribution can be much wider (which, on top of everything else, encourages greater peer review!).

And so we're left in a position where the only "benefit" of copyright in academia is to prop up a journal system that is expensive and inefficient, and which is almost entirely obsolete in the age of the internet. That's not to say there isn't any role for journals -- there clearly are, as we see from various open access journals that take a much more modern approach to these issues.

But, in looking all of this over, it seems like an unfortunate legacy of the copyright system that is props up the broken model of expensive, obsolete, inefficient and poorly vetted journals, while outlawing the efficient, cheap and useful model of an online library of knowledge like Sci-Hub.

If an alien were to come down to the planet today, and you had to justify why Sci-Hub is illegal and the journals are considered admired institutions of academia, I don't think anyone could legitimately do so. And when that's the situation, it seems like it's time to fix the system that lead to such a completely broken result.

Filed Under: academic papers, copyright, innovation, knowledge, open access, paywalls, progress
Companies: sci-hub

Boston Globe Blocks Readers Using Privacy Modes In Browsers

from the noncognito dept

While the Boston Globe has had a paywall on its site for some time -- the metered sort that lets you read a certain number of articles for free before insisting you sign up for an account with a subcription -- that paywall also featured an open tunnel allowing anyone running their browsers in private or incognito mode to drive right through it. This workaround was well known and used since at least 2014, although hunting around on google search results seems to make it clear that this was all found out because people generally like to use privacy and incognito modes in their browsers for the very reasons the browsers developed them: security and privacy.

Two things that perhaps the folks at the Boston Globe don't consider terribly important as they have elected to simply block all readership from browsers running in privacy modes unless the reader signs up for a subscription.

The Boston Globe website is closing off a hole in its paywall by preventing visitors who aren't logged in from reading articles in a browser's private mode.

"You're using a browser set to private or incognito mode" is the message given to BostonGlobe.com visitors who click on articles in private mode. "To continue reading articles in this mode, please log in to your Globe account." People who aren't already Globe subscribers are urged to subscribe.

It's a strange request for a couple of reasons. First, many privacy modes don't even keep sites from tracking what you're doing. They do, however, tend to limit the ability to track you across multiple different sites as you browse. Second, there is still a laughably easy workaround for anyone that wants to keep seeing free articles from the Boston Globe without a subscription: simply delete all cookies from the Boston Globe off of your computer and, voila, you get more free articles. Regardless of both, punishing readers for their privacy concerns probably isn't the best way to build subscription bases.

The Globe policy is a case of "disrespecting user preferences," Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Technologist Alexei Miagkov told Ars. Miagkov was not aware of any other sites blocking users in private browsing mode.

Logging into the website in private mode puts your privacy at risk, he said. "By logging in you make it easy for them to keep tracking you, to keep building their (advertising) user profiles," he said. "They may also sync their tracking data with their advertising partners whereas if you hadn't logged in, those advertising partners might see a new visitor for every new incognito session."

It's worth noting that this isn't a technical limitation, but a choice that the Globe is making almost certainly for those advertising reasons. There are many newspaper sites that have managed to allow for free articles in privacy modes, such as The Chicago Tribune and USA Today. Whatever you think of paywalls generally, I can't imagine how this disregard for readers' privacy choices builds a path to long term paywall success.

Filed Under: browsers, incongnito, news, newspapers, paywalls, private mode
Companies: boston globe

Spotify (Basically) Tells Its Free Users, 'Go Pirate!'

from the carrots-taste-better-than-sticks dept

Spotify is pulling the plug on free access to some artists' newest releases, according to The Guardian. Currently, Spotify's 50 million paid users fork over £10/month to play their music offline without ads, but now they're also getting exclusive access to artists' biggest new releases. Meanwhile, Spotify's other 50 million free users have their access suddenly restricted.

This has been a major sticking point with some artists and labels for many years. They've long demanded that some music only be available to paying subscribers because the royalties shared there are much higher. With this new setup -- which Spotify loudly resisted for years -- Spotify benefits by paying fewer royalty fees to record labels, though those fees from free streaming were lower per stream than paid streams anyway. But it's the record labels that pushed this one through:

Labels believe the free tier, which pays lower royalties per stream, can serve to cannibalise other audiences, hitting album sales and lowering the incentive to upgrade to premium.

We've heard this argument before, and too many times. It's always some iteration of the following (choose one from each line):

Bootlegging / piracy / free access / abundance
+
kills / devalues / cannibalizes
+
music / movies / books / games / art

Taylor Swift even invoked this argument when she recently pulled her songs from Spotify: "music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free." Of course, Swift's fallacy is equating importance & value with rarity. Water, for example, is critically important and valuable… but also far from rare. Rare things are typically valuable because they are rare, but music that can be copied to every hard drive on the planet at no cost? The polar opposite of rare. Will Spotify yanking access to newer releases actually encourage its free users to upgrade to a premium account? Not likely. As you may remember, the Copia Institute published a report on this very topic called The Carrot or The Stick? Innovation vs. Anti-Piracy Enforcement, and its key findings should be emailed to the CEOs of every record label:

In Sweden, the success of Spotify resulted in a major decline in the file sharing of music on websites like The Pirate Bay. A similar move was not seen in the file sharing of TV shows and movies... until Netflix opened its doors.

In response to rights holder complaints, the Korean government pressured popular music subscription service MelOn to double the price of subscriptions. Since the mandated increase, online music sites have seen a drop in the number of subscriptions as consumers move back to unauthorized means of access.

Strict criminal penalties in Japan for copyright infringement, enacted in 2012, didn’t prevent a steep 17% decline in CD sales, nor spur rapid adoption of streaming music services. Streaming services are starting to catch on in Japan, but only as their selection and convenience have improved significantly.

New Zealand passed the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendments Act, also known as “Skynet.” After enactment, there was a short-lived drop in illegal downloads over a two-month period (Aug.-Sept. 2011), but after that activity returned to previous levels.

Because Spotify's decision affects 50 million users, this move could create huge waves for both Spotify and the music industry as a whole, since it could encourage users to regress from free (and legal) methods to their familiar free (and illegal) methods. Most everyone knows you can type in "Taylor Swift discography torrent" into Google and get years of Taylor Swift's music in minutes without paying Spotify, record labels, or Taylor Swift. So what will happen when 50 million users you've been slowly leading away from piracy suddenly feel like they've been left out in the cold?

Filed Under: free, music, music streaming, paywalls, windows
Companies: spotify

Lots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don't Work

from the shocking,-there dept

For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is "the answer" for the declining news business, we've been pointing out how fundamentally stupid paywalls are for the news. Without going into all of the arguments again, the short version is this: the business of newspapers has never really been "the news business" (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It's always been the community and attention business. And in the past they were able to command such attention and build a community around news because they didn't have much competition. But the competitive landscape for community and attention has changed (massively) thanks to the internet. And putting up a paywall makes it worse. In most cases, it's limiting the ability of these newspapers to build communities or get attention, and actively pushing people away.

And, yes, sure, people will point to the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as proof that "paywalls work." But earth to basically every other publication: you're not one of those publications. The paywalls there only work because of the unique content they have, and even then they don't work as well as most people think.

Not surprisingly, more and more newspapers that bet on paywalls are discovering that they don't really work that well and were a waste of time and effort -- and may have driven away even more readers.

Of the paywalls erected in the past few years, many have delivered lackluster results, said Ken Doctor, a media consultant who writes the blog Newsonomics.

"The ones that were launched in 2012 to 2014 had good early results and they all largely stalled," he said.

"They are no longer gaining much in the way of new digital subscriptions, and their print is in rapid decline."

The article also quotes Alan Mutter who has been pointing out the fallacies around newspaper paywalls for probably longer than I have:

Paywalls can backfire also "because they put a barrier between the newspaper and the casual reader," he added.

"They are truncating the size of the digital market, when the most important factor for digital is scale."

Meanwhile, as newspapers are realizing this, even the "successful" paywall folks at the Wall Street Journal appear to be changing up its paywall to make it easier for non-paying users to read the articles.

This doesn't mean that you can't get money from readers -- but paywalls are a stupid way to do it. You're asking them to pay for the same kind of value that they can often get elsewhere. That's dumb. If you're charging, you should be charging for unique value and something different that only your publication can provide. General interest news is not that.

Filed Under: business models, community, journalism, news, newspapers, paywalls

Another Newspaper Paywall Bites The Dust

from the bye-bye dept

For many years, we've warned newspapers that rushed headlong into paywalls that it was a fool's game. While, yes, their traditional advertising business was struggling, the idea that people would come out of the woodwork to suddenly pay for the online version seemed unlikely to come true, other than -- perhaps -- for the very largest newspapers in the world, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal (and even then...). And yet, there remain a religious few who insist that paywalls must be the answer. They're wrong each and every time, but they can't stop screaming it. And so they trick foolish newspapers, desperate for some way to stem the revenue slide, into implementing a paywall, and nearly all of those papers discover the same damn thing: the people don't pay, and thanks to the paywall, the traffic decreases, fewer people link to or share their stories, and the advertisers go away even faster.

The latest to make this discovery: the Toronto Star, which has announced that its paywall is going away. Notably, it was the newspaper's own advertisers who helped management make this decision:

This decision means that effective April 1 all of our award-winning content will be available free on our website, thestar.com, and across all digital devices, including tablets and smartphones.

We are making this move after extensive input from our readers and our advertisers. Listening to our audiences is critical to the success of our daily newspaper and our digital offerings and we are committed to continually adjusting our digital strategies to provide them with what they want.

We've been saying it for years, but it needs to be said again: the news "business" has almost never (there are a very few exceptions) really been the "news" business. It has almost always been the community business. Build a community and then do something to monetize that community to continue serving that community. Most of the time that's been selling their attention in the form of ads. But, since the rise of the internet, newspapers no longer had quite the monopolistic control on the communities they were serving. That's the real challenge facing the old newspapers. How to continue to build a community. And yet, rather than look to add value and give the community reasons to stick around, they've gone in the other direction: trying to lock out the community, to put up barriers and toll booths that actually diminish the value to the community. A paywalled story is one that people are less likely to share, less likely to discuss, and less likely to visit altogether.

Meanwhile, you see stories about companies like Nextdoor, which are actively building local communities by providing value, and they're valued at over a billion dollars. Why didn't newspapers build something like that, rather than focus on putting up a stupid paywall that no one wanted?

The NY Times and the WSJ's "paywalls" are still really little more than the "emperor's new paywall." Both are easy to get around, so they still get people sharing. People pay because they're "the NY Times" and "the Wall Street Journal," and some feel a sort of obligation to pay. But they're hardly paying because of the paywall.

The Toronto Star's decision to kill off its paywall just reinforces the simple fact that a paywall is a stupid business model in an age of abundant information. The publications that get the most attention these days -- places like Buzzfeed and Vox and Vice -- don't talk about paywalls at all, because they know it would be pointless and go against the very concept of everything that they're building. So it still amazes me that other newspapers have been suckered into believing that a paywall is somehow the answer.

Filed Under: business models, journalism, paywalls, value
Companies: toronto star

Surprise: Paywalls Cause Massive Falls In Number Of Visitors - And Boost Competitors

from the no,-really? dept

As Techdirt has been pointing out for years, newspaper paywalls make no sense. By stopping people from reading your stories unless they have a subscription, you diminish your influence in the media world, drastically reduce the number of readers and thus make it much harder to generate revenue from them. Paywalls are also a gift to your competitors, as this story in the Guardian indicates:

Mirror Group Digital enjoyed a surge in daily browsers of nearly 20% last month, after [Rupert Murdoch's newspaper] the Sun introduced its website paywall.

...

[The UK publishing group] Trinity Mirror launched an aggressive campaign to lure digital Sun website users seeking to continue reading free online content, following the introduction of a paywall for the News UK title on 1 August.

The introduction of paywalls for Times and Sunday Times content in 2010 led to a 90% drop in traffic. Online metrics firm SimilarWeb has estimated Sun+ monthly site visits were down by more than 60% in August.

This really isn't rocket science: if you make it harder to read your stories, your competitors would be foolish not to take advantage of this fact to encourage people to move across and read their freely-available reporting instead. Some may call this a race to the bottom, and it is as far as how much you can charge is concerned -- that's just basic economics in the digital world. But that doesn't mean there's a race to the bottom in terms of the quality of the journalism. Indeed, skimping there would be unwise, since it would allow competitors to match you on price and beat you on quality.

The challenge is to use a larger readership to pay for that journalism by earning revenue in other ways -- advertising is currently one of the most popular approaches, but others are possible. However, introducing paywalls makes it much harder to generate money, since the online readership is much smaller -- as the experiences of Murdoch's Times, Sunday Times and the Sun all demonstrate. The subscription revenue produced by the paywall rarely compensates for this loss. It will be interesting to see whether Rupert Murdoch sticks with the paywalled approach, or is forced to remove them in order to compete with flourishing titles like those from Trinity Mirror.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: news, paywalls

Yet Another Newspaper Paywall Goes Bust: SF Chronicle Gives Up After Just Four Months

from the not-the-panacea-you've-been-expecting dept

I know that within newspaper circles it's become popular to claim that we've now entered the era of the paywall. Paywall supporters love to point to the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal -- along with claims from various paywall companies that more and more newspapers are moving over to such a model. However, we've been hearing plenty of stories suggesting that for most every newspaper that isn't a major national or international brand, the paywalls are looking like dismal failures. Very, very, very few (at times, shockingly few) people are signing up, and by setting up the paywall, they're actually losing a fair number of online visitors. This isn't a surprise. As we've been arguing for years, a paywall is the exact wrong strategy for most newspapers, since the real business they're in is building a community and then selling that community's attention. Yet, a paywall makes it much, much harder to build a community, first by putting up a tollbooth, and then making it nearly impossible for readers to share the news and bring others into that community.

So it should come as little surprise that the SF Chronicle here in San Francisco has apparently killed its paywall after just four months. The quickness with which it's been pulled certainly suggests that the number of signups was appallingly low and someone finally did the math and realized what a colossal disaster this was going to be. For your typical metro or regional newspaper, all a paywall really does is open up a huge market for online competitors. It looks like the Chronicle found that out the hard way.

Filed Under: business models, newspapers, paywalls
Companies: sf chronicle

A Human Right To Science, Locked Behind A Paywall, Inspires New Meme

from the bp;dr dept

We've spoken out for a long time about why paywalls are generally a bad idea. Sure, they can earn some companies a bit of money that may slow down their decline, but there's little evidence that they can be useful in the long term. Paywalls go against almost every core concept of what works online. They make information harder to share, harder to discuss, harder to build upon. They also open up huge opportunities for others, who don't have paywalls, to step in and scoop up the missing traffic. Over at the Neurobonkers blog, they've noticed something rather ironic in a new paper from the famed journal Science, called A Human Right to Science. Apparently, that "right to science" is so strong that Science (with a capital S) has locked it up behind a paywall. In response, the folks at Neurobonkers have tried coining a new meme, known as bp;dr, or "behind paywall, didn't read" a play on the well known tl;dr. There is an unfortunate irony at work here. Having an article on the human right to access... and then making sure it's not accessible. Whose bright idea was that?

Filed Under: access, behind paywall didn't read, bp;dr, paywalls, science

Silliest Argument Ever: Just Because A YouTube Paywall Launches It Means More Money Is Made

from the myths-myths-and-more-myths dept

On Tuesday, as rumors were spreading about YouTube's plans to launch a paywall we reminded folks that Google had actually tried this twice before and no one paid. On Thursday, the folks at HuffPost Live had me join a video panel discussing this. What we didn't realize was at the very moment we were talking about it, YouTube had officially launched the program. You can see the discussion below, where I play the role of the lone dissenter who argues that this is a dumb idea: What annoys me about this is that everyone else was making the same silly arguments that were debunked over and over again on the newspaper side -- that paywalls lead to a higher quality product and more investment into the content. That's not true if no one pays. It's a pretty simple equation: if you, say, get 10 subscribers for $2/month, that's $20/month. That's not that much money. If you can make more than that in advertising, then you're better off advertising. Yet, time and time again in the video above you see people claim that it's somehow automatic that putting up a paywall will mean "more money" and "the end of free content" or "profits so that more investment can happen in video."

All of that makes a huge assumption: that enough people will actually subscribe. Yet there's simply no basis for it, and yet people kept claiming it over and over again as if it had to be true. But we know it's not necessarily true, because we've already seen Google try exactly the same thing. Hell, let's take a look at the original Google Video, launched about six years ago, with a similar subscription offering: And now let's look at the new YouTube pay channels: It's basically the same thing, though, I'd argue that the original Google Video had even more brand name content. In 2010, when Google tried the exact same thing with YouTube, over the course of 10 days, they only got $10,000. I'm not against experimenting. And I'm not against models where people pay -- I think things like Netflix and Spotify and the like are really interesting business models. But, those work because of different factors: mainly a combination of convenience and a ton of content all together. People are paying for those because of the completeness of the offering. Here, people are being asked to spend between $1 and $10 per month for a single channel of content. It may work for a few specialized shows: Game of Thrones? Yeah, sure. But not many others.

This idea that people paying directly is the only "real" business model is just silly. The guy who did a video comment during the panel discussion who seemed to argue that this was necessary because it's "capitalism" doesn't understand economics. A bad business model is a bad business model.

Filed Under: business models, economics, money, paywalls, video, youtube
Companies: google