Scientists Have Taken To Social Media To Share Their Frustrations
An Unseen Barrier to Scientific Progress
Every day, scientists around the world do groundbreaking research with public funds as they open access to their research. They write up their findings, and submit them to academic journals, hoping to get those papers published so they can share their work with the world.
If they’re lucky enough to have their papers accepted by a journal, they then have to pay thousands of dollars in “article processing fees” just to publish their own work. In some cases, that’s more than an entire year of grant money — money that was originally intended for research.
The problem is particularly pronounced in the Global South, where scientists are often prohibited from publishing their work in Open Access Journals because they can’t pay fees of as much as $5,000 per paper.
But if researchers don’t publish their findings and make them available to the public, not only does it prevent them from contributing further to science and medicine, but it also prevents others from building on that research or using it for new discoveries.
In other words: it’s a lose-lose situation.
Researchers Have to Pay to Publish
This may come as something of a surprise to you. After all, who wouldn’t want to publish research that could have positive ramifications internationally?
In theory, good research should be evaluated based on its merits alone: how important the topic is and how well thought out and executed the research was. In practice though, researchers are often deterred from submitting their work by publication fees — fees necessary to cover article processing costs like editing services and journal hosting or archiving costs.
Publication fees fall under what’s known as “double dipping” in scholarly publishing — the practice of charging libraries and readers twice for access to academic content because institutions subscribe to journals while authors pay publication fees when they submit their articles.
Scientists Forced to Pay for Research Out of Pocket
But even if they’re able to get a grant, it’s often not enough to cover the cost of their research. In fact, in many countries, scientists are required to pay for their own research expenses. For example, if you’re doing an experiment on flies and need a few hundred thousand live flies for your work, you’d have to purchase those insects yourself.
So when these researchers are forced to choose between paying for research or publishing their findings, they end up having to decide between continuing with their work or sharing what they’ve learned with other researchers around the world. It just doesn’t make sense — especially since these scientists are doing valuable work that can benefit all of us.
Many researchers would rather sacrifice publishing their results than sacrifice doing good science.
Some researchers even choose not to publish because they don’t want to contribute any more money to the academic publishing industry, which has become too expensive and inaccessible for many people who need these published research findings the most.
You Can’t Get Published, So You Can’t Get Funding
It’s frustratingly circular: the more you publish, the more chances you have of getting funding. But to prove your value by publishing, you need money. And to get that money, you need to publish.
So scientists are stuck in a Catch-22.
If you can’t afford to publish your work, there’s a chance it won’t make it into the public sphere at all — because if no one knows about it, no one can fund it.
So even though this research could help benefit people around the world, they may never get to see its results because of issues with cost and accessibility — issues that could be solved by having access to more funding in the first place.
Learning about this is the first step to being part of the solution. At first, it seems like there are more than enough funding sources for researchers in the Global South. Grants, fellowships, and awards are all available to deserving scientists working in these regions.
If a researcher has never been published before, they’re unlikely to get one of those grant dollars to help them conduct their research.
If you’re a researcher in this situation, your options are limited: you can go into debt by paying for publishing fees yourself or struggle along in obscurity with no funding or recognition for your work.
These scientists and their work are left behind, our entire world is missing out on potentially revolutionary discoveries.
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