Paywalls

From time to time I ponder about they way that one has to pay significant sums to commercial publishers to read the results of publicly funded research. Significant going beyond the admittedly important duty of arranging for papers submitted for publication to be refereed. So I was interested today to read that the Bill & Melinda Foundation is making it a condition of funding research that the results of such research should be published open-access on the web.

Coincidentally, I went on to read a free puff for an article about something called the claustrum by one Kristoff Koch. Having read and read of the chap before, I thought I would follow up.

After some registration pack-drill, I learn that Elsevier would be happy to sell me a two page article from 'Epilepsy & Behavior' for the modest sum of  $31.50 USD exclusive of taxes and delivery charges. It then turns out that this is not quite what I wanted, merely being editorial comment on the wanted article, the five pages of which one could have for a further $31.50 USD exclusive of taxes and delivery charges. From which we deduce that they work to a flat rate, rather than charging by the page or according to the eminence of the authors.  The good news is that an article which in some part fired all this up can be downloaded for free from our own Royal Society and all you have to do is ask google for 'phil trans roy soc series b biol'. Not only does it weigh in at a rather longer nine and a bit pages, you also get no less than 70 references to follow up.

But, to be fair, as with Brill (see reference 1), Elsevier do offer open access publication, with the model that you pay them to publish your paper rather than your readers paying. Presumably in this case the universities involved - five of them spanning three countries and at least two languages (how on earth can you do research on this basis) - did not care to pay to publish. Perhaps the money to pay their subscriptions to the likes of Elsevier comes from a different pot, with a different cost code.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/academic-presses.html.