Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is there any research/study/survey/... that tried to estimate how much it would cost to remove paper pay-walls so that all existing research papers are made publicly available free of charge?
E.g. France paid Elsevier 172 million EUR (mirror) so that 476 universities and medical center can have legal access to 2000 journals for five years. I wonder how much it would cost to buy the access to all papers so that anyone can access then.
Zero. The government of the nation you live in can pass a bill that mandates that all (existing and future) published research papers are made publicly available and redistributable.
It's an interesting thought. Presumably, if you looked at the market capitalisation of some of the major commercial journal publishers, you could get a sense of how much it would cost to purchase both ownership of the intellectual property in such articles, journals, infrastructure and many other things.
I did a quick google and it suggested that the market capitalisation of Elsevier (for example http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/REL:LN) was 35 billion British Pounds (although I'm no expert in reading this stuff, and there seems like there is a lot of aggregation of companies into larger structures). My main point is that there is presumably a market value associated with the vast majority of the commercial publishing literature. It would be interesting to get an estimate of what this is (e.g., is it a half trillion US dollars or perhaps its much less, I'm not sure). The main point is that it would be theoretically possible for governments to buy such companies or alternatively acquire the rights at commercial rates. It would however be very expensive.
Alternatively, governments could change intellectual property law in relation to scientific journals or some category of material. There are a variety of ways that this could be done. A simple option would just be to mandate that articles in scientific journals need to be made accessible on a suitable repository (e.g., like pubmed) perhaps after some embargo period.
In general, a lot of this raises a number of broader legal issues. For example, it may be considered poor legal precedent to change the law after the fact. I.e., journals invested in publications on the assumption that their intellectual property would be protected and these rights are then unilaterally taken away by government. In some legal contexts, this may give rise to the publishers having rights for financial compensation.
The alternative strategy is to focus more on ways going forward that the published literature can be more accessible to the general public. For example, this can be seen in various conditions placed on grants that the publications need to be open.
I think that your example does not reflect the question. I didn't read the entire contract but it seems to me that France has just paid in advance the publisher's fees for five years for all the universities.
Probably they got a large discount, with respect to what they would have had to pay without such a large contract, but the order of magnitude is roughly the same.
For instance, in Italy all the university libraries are public, which means that any citizen can enter and read books and journals. Sometimes ago, I looked at the annual budgets of a few university libraries, and depending on the size of the university they ranged from a few hundred thousand euros to several million euros. Unfortunately there was no information on the expense breakdown between journals, books and databases, but I think it's reasonable to consider around 50 k€ for a major, possibly greedy, publisher (years ago I heard that IEEE journals where around 30 k€).
Hence, if you consider 50 k€ for roughly 500 universities and centers for five years you obtain 125 M€, which is of the order of magnitude of what France has paid.
Therefore, according to your example,
How much would it cost to remove pay-walls?
It costs as much as the total fees.
Is there any research/study/survey/... that tried to estimate how much it would cost to remove paper pay-walls so that all existing research papers are made publicly available free of charge?
I am not aware of any such study. The cost however, could be pretty minimal if the governments of a couple of key countries (e.g., US, UK, Germany, etc) decided to make it happen. If laws were passed to outlaw restrictive licenses on research publications, this would effectively remove pay walls.
A few years back, the NIH mandated that all publications resulting from NIH funded work be made freely available after an embargo period. While the NIH is still willing to provide funding for publication and open access fees, if they stopped, people would be forced to publish in free (both as in beer and as in freedom) places. Similarly, there is discussion that in the future in the UK the REF will only count open access publications. Again the research councils provide funding for publication and open access fees, but if they stopped, people would publish in free places.
