Science Business

The problem that Soros and the Open Access movement focused on (lack of free or cheap scientific journals) was unknown to me for apparent reasons until last year when I started writing my bachelor thesis.

First - I'd like to state out the more "extreme" problems with scientific journals today - students lack the ability to browse them, as the principles of searching (and outcomes) in systems like EBSCO etc are not similar to what we (or they) are used to use. For example - my 16 year old brother doesn't know how to search Google with aids (using *, ?. + etc) and rather just inputs the word and hopes on the search aid (Google recommendations). Imagine what will happen, if he enters the college (which I hope he does) and tries to use this decades-old system to search for knowledge left by us or persons before us.

The other problem is that there is no universal platform for searching these articles. Imagine, if with have to search the internet from 3 or 4 engines to get a good overview of the subject. Sure it can be done today, but who really uses anything else but Google? (ok, Bing?). And because of the lack of the platform we are left in the situation, where the search results in different databases offer plentiful of results (a great amount of results aka. articles) but just a small fraction of them is eventually fount out by me to be useful to me. Unfortunately.

And only now do i reach to the third problem which is of course the the cost of these journals. Science business at the root of itself is ill to me, as I despise the concept that one should pay money for scientific knowledge. Why? I guess the critique would be the cost of production and reviewing (both academic and linguistic).

I agree with the cost but they can be minimized. The cost of publishing for example can be null - we have options of free-ware software that can be used to publicize the knowledge over internet. If one would like to own a hard copy (for reasons unknown to me forever), then he or she should pay for it (by a price higher than expected). I'd like to point out here the article by Umberto Eco where the gentlemen bashes my dislike of materialized knowledge, but for many reasons I still dislike the idea of printed word.


The cost of linguistic reviewing should be left to the author to carry (with different software and personal linguistic reviewers).

The cost of reviewing the article should be null. Why would a scientist or a researcher take money to review an article? I see the review process being part of what defines a scientist. After all - he or she was on the same position when starting their scientific career. I know that we all are busy - let's execute the laws of economy here then - the options being that there should be then more scientist (reviewers) or the publications should decline (greater time-frame for publicizing). Although here my idea gets its greatest error - we like that the scientific articles get published so rapidly - this gives us more knowledge on fresher subjects.


So I guess to only reason why scientific journals should and would take money, is because of the pressure from the scientific society to get fresher and greater amount of information. Who pays for it, is left to decide by the society, but eventually we all pay for it anyway though taxes so it is here unimportant.

Is this a Digital Divide-causing factor? Of course it is. Martin Hallik from the University of Tartu Library has written many articles on the subject, basically stating that Estonian scientist would get dumber and e-Estonia would further decrease in its innovation because of the lack of funding in scientific journals database subscription.

Imagine what is the situation in Armenia? Tunisia? Zimbabwe?
The divide is and unfortunately will continue to grow.