Taxing the Intellectual Base: Should Authors Foot the Publishing Bill?

摘要

An author spends, depending on the research conducted, hours, days, weeks, months or even years collecting data for resolving a hypothesis. The ultimate objective, except for those scientists who wish to patent their results or seek commercial gains by selling patented protocols, is to publish their results. By publishing their results, scientists ultimately hope to reach other scientists who can access their important data and then possibly use that protocol or reference that paper as part of the methodology or discussion in recognition of their efforts. The size of the publisher, abstracting and indexing, as well as traditional print or open access (OA) are all aspects that can influence the visibility of a paper. In most cases, even with top-tierpublishers, authors are not charged to publish and publishers make profits from authors further down the line in the processing step such as reprints, subscriptions, or other chargeable paid services. In the platinum OA model, the publisher does not charge the author to publish while in the gold OA model the author must pay to publish the PDF file as OA. In this paper I challenge the basic principle that a scientist be charged to publish, independent of the benefits received based on one logical aspect