Pandemic Aftermath Threatens Science Publishing
April 17, 2020
The spread of COVID-19 has led to the lifting of some paywalls on published research and an expanded sharing of findings, opening scientific publishing to an extent, but the pandemic’s economic fallout might ultimately allow large commercial publishers to flourish while smaller nonprofit ones suffer, frustrating efforts to build a more accessible publishing enterprise. Bad news. In Issues, a scholar who has examined the industry concluded that profit-seeking publishers exert undue power over what scientists study and how they are judged, and he called for a “revolt by scientists, policy-makers, and the public alike.”