Open Access Journals: Why Do I Need to Be at Uni to Access This Type of Work?
The relevance of journal articles to my daily life isn’t something that I ever considered until I left university for the first time. Journal articles didn’t cross my radar until I went to university, so it was a surprise to realise that I missed them after just three short years of a whirlwind relationship. They were there for me when no one else was (3 a.m. essay deadlines), they were a voice of reason in the chaos (if someone cleverer than me wrote it, it must be convincing), and I never gave them any love in return.
After leaving university and attempting to step into the “real world” of jobs and rent, I found myself longing for the days of idly scrolling through an article in the library, rewarding myself with a large hot chocolate after a couple of hours of procrastinating. I ended up going back to university to do a master’s degree just before the pandemic hit and, as everything very quickly went online, I became a bit of an aficionado when it comes to finding articles online.
More importantly, the more I found out about how hard it is to read a damn article if you don’t have a university log in, the more I began to dislike the system.
Let’s have a quick rundown of how things get published in a peer reviewed journal. First of all, you need to have an article written. Something ground-breaking, ideally, or at least vaguely original. When you’ve poured blood, sweat, and tears into the article, it’s ready to submit to the journal of your choice. This might involve a cover letter, maybe sending in your CV, and it will absolutely require an abstract. Assuming you get past the first filter, you will be reviewed. And, oh boy, do those reviewers go in for the jugular.
Sometimes, the reviewers assigned to you will know the area you’re writing about well. This kind of reviewer’s feedback can be emotionally devastating, but you can console yourself with a mantra about constructive criticism. Other times, the reviewers will have the most tenuous link to your subject area. Feedback from them is often maddening bordering on patronising. As one friend dealing with the second type of feedback once ranted to me, criticising a paper’s methodology for “not recording more detail about the specimens” is pretty ridiculous when the specimens were fish and the reason for the lack of detail was that the fish swam away.
If you survive the reviewing stage and your paper gets accepted, congratulations! In six-to-eighteen months your work will be read by an incredibly niche subset of people, possibly with a great deal of resentment if it becomes a required reading for students somewhere.
I in no way shape or form want to play down the achievement of getting published in a journal. It’s a great achievement and is massively important in pushing forward any kind of evolution or debate in research and teaching. If we don’t have new voices being published and new theories emerging, we’re doomed to rely on the voices of dead white men forever.
However, academic publishing is a broken system, and it needs replacing, not fixing.
Open access is not the norm in academic publishing. There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is the expense. Paywalls and subscribed access can go some way towards providing for the huge amount of resources required to get an edition of a journal published.
Except that every author and the majority of reviewers are unpaid. Editors are sometimes paid, and website designers and managers are paid. But the people who share their research and help brush it up for publication, by and large, are not paid for those hours.
So why are the journals so expensive? There are certainly other costs (indexing, web hosting, that kind of thing), but a great deal of the reason comes down to prestige.
When “well-educated” is seen as synonymous for “intelligent”, a lot of social and economic power is put in the hands of higher education. Consider how many members of the current Conservative government and how many preceding Prime Ministers went to Oxford/Cambridge/another very expensive university and/or a heinously expensive private school. Socially, we continue to put a huge amount of value on where you were educated and how many degrees you have collected.
Unfortunately, higher education is increasingly profit driven, and degrees are outrageously expensive if you don’t have generational wealth or a rare and very large scholarship behind you. This means that under-represented and marginalised voices continue to be under-represented and marginalised, and the bulk of people who can access higher levels of education are doing so on the back of some level of privilege.
Peer reviewed papers, generally, are more trustworthy than papers published with no third-party oversight. If you had a peer reviewed paper by multiple widely published doctors and put it next to a blog post that went viral, you can pretty safely bet that the peer reviewed conclusions have a bit more clout to them. But if you can only access that knowledge by paying for it (or by paying university fees to get the library login that lets you access the journal), then anyone who cannot pay does not get to see the more reliable knowledge and, instead, has to rely on the freely available source.
This means that any research that takes place outside of a university course is incredibly hamstrung by limited journal access. Research that might help communities understand how medicines might affect them, research that might make someone better informed about vaccinations, research that is just interesting to read and learn… Restricting access to knowledge for the privileged few is deliberate and avoidable.
Open communication and the sharing of knowledge, not to mention providing the opportunity to hold experts to account, is fundamental to education. Paywalled access does more to prevent this than protect it; there is a reason that open access articles are more widely cited than paid access ones.
Of course, there are some websites that provide workarounds to the barrier of journal access. If I was acting in any kind of professional capacity, I would be obliged to tell you NEVER to visit Sci-hub, WorldCat or LibGen for your own research needs. Fortunately, I’m not and I can wholeheartedly recommend you to them (particularly if you have the DOI of whatever article you’re trying to access!). But mechanisms that get around the systemic problem will never fix the issue.
Having paywalls and punitive controls over knowledge sharing intersect with a lot of other social forces. There are plenty of practical defences for maintaining the status quo of paid access journals, but only focusing on the cost of transmitting research misses the point. Prioritising status and profit rather than actively making knowledge accessible and open is a mistake, and we are collectively suffering for it.
Written by Beth Price
Beth is a writer and researcher based in Edinburgh. She is interested in all things cultural, especially when it comes to gender, LGBTQ+ identity, and media. She is half of Breakdown Education, an education platform and community that champions intersectional, diverse, and accessible knowledge networks.
You can find Beth on Twitter and see all of her work here, and you can see Breakdown Education’s first online course here.
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