Opinion Piece: Plan Z: Why Politicians Should Ban Government-Funded Research from Being Published in Commercial Outlets

The current state of academic publishing is a sad affair. Academics (funded by taxpayers) edit and review each other’s work, an activity associated with truly staggering effort and costs (i.e., over 100 million work hours of peer review translating to an estimated monetary value of 1.5 billion US dollars per year; Aczel et al., 2021). When the work is deemed of sufficient quality, the author signs away their copyright to the publisher, who then proceeds to hide the work behind a paywall. In order to attain access for their employees, university libraries (funded by taxpayers, again) can buy expensive annual subscriptions.

‍This piece riffs on Plan S which was covered in a previous post.