Your professor is teaching a class on science and society. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Miriam Castellanos
Some governments now require that research funded from public money be published where anyone can read it without payment. Supporters say the public should not have to buy back work it has already paid for. Critics reply that the costs do not disappear but move to the author, that this disadvantages researchers without grants, and that the journals doing the work of review still have to be paid for somehow. Should publicly funded research be free to read? Why?
Selin
Yes, and I would go further. The current arrangement is strange in a way we have stopped noticing: the research is paid for publicly, the peer review is done unpaid by other academics, and then the institution buys the result back at a price it is not allowed to disclose. Whatever the right model is, it is difficult to argue that this one is it.
Wole
I agree with the diagnosis and worry about the cure. Shifting the charge to the author does not remove it; it relocates it onto whoever has the least funding, which in practice means early-career researchers and people in poorer countries. A system that is free to read and expensive to publish in has simply moved the barrier from one end to the other.