Why many research results are presented as paid articles?

Question

Many times I learn or look for some information, I find scientific article on ieeexplore.ieee.org or similar, where articles are paid. Most of the articles are written by some professors of universities or students about their work.

My question is, why do they sell their results?

If I was a professor and made some work, I would like to gain some acknowledgement for it and I think there is no better way then see others work based on mine. So why not to publicly share the article for free?

I understand that private companies sell their innovations because that's the main source of their income, but people at universities are usually paid and writing articles are part of their job.

So what are the advantages of selling results instead of sharing for free (is there any other except money)?

Does selling your results have any negative influence?

PS: I may not have enough backstage knowledge about how it works on universities and I don't want to offend anybody. I also don't mean work people do in their own free time, but work they do on behalf of universities. This just slows down the development and overall research in field in my eyes.

Answer 1

Professors who publish their research results normally do not earn money from these paid articles. It is the publishing journal who earns. There are even journals who ask the author to pay for publishing the articles.

Contact the authors of the paid article directly and ask them for the copy of the article. Be polite, explain why do you need it for. In most cases, you will get that copy for free.

Also, try put the article name and authors into Google search. Another similar article by the same authors may exist and be free to download.

Answer 2

The publication business is largely just that, a business. Publishers make money from selling their product, they need money to keep staff to provide the services as well as make a profit among other things. No journals that I am aware of, or at least have been in contact with, salary authors for what they write. I am sure there may be the odd exception but in general, research articles render no income to the author. Books may be a different story of course.

In the last decades or so Open Access publishing has become more common and some research funding agencies demand results are published in such journals. Check, for example, the Open Access for an introduction to Open Access or the Open Access Net site for additional information. Open Access does not mean everything is free but it moves the charges from the reader to the author so that authors pay to have their papers published. There are free services for publishing. As with everything else, some less scrupulous business models have sprung out of the Open Access idea such as so-called predatory journalsUnfortunately. So awareness is necessary.

Answer 3

As others pointed out, publishing has its costs (editing, maintaining website, creating and distributing print versions etc.) and that has to be paid for. Either by the readers, or by the authors. Each has its pros and cons and it depends on many things, which of the approaches the author takes (funding agency might require the article to be made freely accessible, the author may not have the resources to pay the publishing fee himself, there can be some customs in their field that everyone follows or something else).

I would, anyway, like to point out a different issue here – the number of readers is not affected much by the article being behind a paywall or not. Scientific articles use very technical language and assume certain level of knowledge in their readers, making them less accessible (or even completely unaccessible) to general public. The only readers then come from academic environments, and universities usually pay for subscriptions to the most important journals in each field. Other researchers can thus read scientific papers without any (visible) costs on their side. As long as there are universities willing to pay subscription fees, there will be journals where readers have to pay for articles.

Answer 4

I have had two papers published with IEEE when I was an undergrad. There is no provision for me, or any of my co-authors, to be paid by IEEE. In fact, I was required to pay steep conference registration and publication fees, and also a fee for an extra page on one of the papers, to have the papers published by IEEE. I recall that some conferences also actually require you to attend the conference in order to have the paper published, so, add mandatory hotel accommodations and an airline ticket to that as well (although I'm not complaining, since I got plenty of support from my universities, and conference trips are always a lot of fun).

The way the paper publishing world works is, after and if your work is accepted by a conference, you pay various registration fees and publication fees, transfer your copyright to the publishing house like IEEE (there are some tricks around this, like giving up the copyright instead, by placing your paper into the public domain), or, as is the case with some other publishers, give them a non-exclusive irrevocable royalty-free licence, and then they publish your work on their web-site (with a right of collecting fees from web-site users, too), as well as possibly into a printed proceedings of the conference that's given to all attendees (sometimes for an extra fee, too).

Many universities in the US, Canada, England and other contries, pay IEEE some kind of subscription fees, so, anyone on the university network is automatically given unlimited free access to all such papers that are published by IEEE. Otherwise, if you're using a home connection, or your university lacks any such agreement with IEEE, then IEEE collects individual fees for every paper directly from end users (and gives none of it to the authors of said papers).

As mentioned by other answers, many authors also place a copy of their papers on their own web-site. This is often done illegally, since they often no longer own the copyright to such papers, so, depending on the circumstances, IEEE and such can potentially resort to legal methods to enforce its copyright against the illegal copies. For practical reasons and bad-publicity considerations, this is not actively done in reality. It is also the case that after having the copyright assigned to itself, IEEE and other publishers generally give some kind of non-exclusive licence back to the authors with some limited rights on what could be done with an exact copy of the paper. IANAL, but I think the language of such licence is generally restrictive enough that you're not actually supposed to provide the very same copy of the paper elsewhere to the general public in an unrestricted access.

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In contrast, these academic conferences are different to the technical conferences around open-source software. With technical conferences, there is a lot of members of the general public who want to see the presentation of the author, and such members of the public pay modest registration fees, which, when taken together, together with some contributions by big-name sponsors, are enough not only to support the web-site with free access to all the resources, and potentially a publication of the paper proceedings, but are also often sufficient enough to even cover the airfare and other travel expenses of the authors.