Free Access to Scientific Literature Could Prompt a Change for Expensive Journal Subscriptions
As a graduate student, I access scientific literature very frequently. For me, it's as simple as logging in through my institution's library website, where I'm directed through a proxy server whereby I can access the full catalogs of most of the major databases (Elsevier, JStor, ACS, etc.). However, for the average person, accessing the latest scientific publications can be impossible. Most of the major databases require a subscription or a one time fee (which can be $50 for one article) to access the content. No one wants to shell out $50 every time they're curious about something new.
Sci-Hub is seeking to change that.
Founded in 2011, Sci-Hub is a project that seeks to enable free access to all scientific literature, albeit through means that may be less than ethical. Sci-Hub pirates scientific papers and republishes them for free (their website now resides on the Dark Web due to takedown efforts by major journal publishers). A new study on the comprehensiveness of Sci-Hub found that it contains 68.9% of all scholarly literature- that's over 55 million articles.
Scientific journal subscriptions are quite expensive. When I was an undergraduate student, I remember talking to some of the librarians at my institution about how much they pay for the subscriptions, and the numbers were astonishing. In its 2015-2016 Annual Report, the libraries at NC State University stated its collections expenditures, that is, the amount spent on subscriptions to academic journals and databases, at over $11 million. Remarkably, the report states that this amount is far below others in NC State's peer group, including Texas A&M, which spent over $27 million on collections. These expenditures start to make even less sense when you consider that many of the scientific articles that universities pay handsomely for are funded by taxpayer dollars through various organizations such as the National Science Foundation. Should taxpayers have access to research findings that they helped fund?
Another issue is the profitability of the database companies. RELX Group, the owner of Elsevier, has a market capitalization of $42.8 billion. In 2016, the company had an operating revenue of nearly $10 billion with a profit margin of 25%. The RELX Group has also been the subject of boycotts by researchers who believe such profits on academic research are unacceptable.
The debate over whether taxpayers should have access to government-funded research has also been the subject of several bills introduced in Congress, including one which would have made it illegal for the government to release research published by private companies, regardless of whether the research was funded by government grants. Another bill was introduced that would have allowed taxpayer access to research. Neither bill passed.
Will Sci-Hub's crusade cause database companies to rethink their pricing model? Will Congress take action to allow open access to government-funded research?
As the debate continues, it would certainly mean more for education to have open access to all academic research, but should it come in the form of piracy? For now, I'll continue working on my research project in graduate school, hoping that some day I'll get to publish an article in a journal. When that time comes, I suppose I'll have the choice of viewing the paper via my library's proxy, but when it comes to sharing the publication with friends and family outside of academia, well that's another story.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this subject, especially if you're involved in academic research like me. Feel free to leave comments and questions below.
This article was inspired by @steemiteducation, an account dedicated to all things education.
Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/bizmac/1128597509/sizes/l/in/photostream/ Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License
Great post and insight. The amount of money spent on journals is definitely out of control, nice to see some numbers put to it, thanks for that!
The only real solution is for new, essentially free services to arise that have the appeal to draw scientists to publish there rather than through these "archaic" systems. They are designed for profit, particularly for people not even doing the research, rather than for knowledge.
As far as this topic goes, nothing is more important than the free flow of information in society. Not everyone can afford to compensate people for their time and efforts, nor should they be required to. A system where people understand that compensation helps people survive and thrive and so, when they so choose and are able, they are actively willing to do so to support a system that is generally free, like wikipedia's donation based style, is definitely the wave of the future.
It's just a matter of getting people to accept the information that comes through such systems can be as thorough as scientific journal standards require, which means it needs real scientific discoveries to start coming through such a system. As well as raising awareness so people understand to compensate others for their efforts when they deem appropriate, which is really why costs ever got into the mix to begin with (albeit greed takes over and makes things outrageous).
Steemit has a platform that is quite in line with that idea, though I would think this is really a first-go-at-it rather than the most worked out system. There are many things that would need adjusted and tweaked to really make scientific discovery through such a platform be the main method of sharing information.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I think the most interesting thing you pointed out is how inherent the conflict of interest is when journal companies are out to make a profit. This definitely can have an impact on what gets published and the quality of the editing. I suppose we can hope that one day more people will have access to print publications or online versions. I think it would help people be more informed. I know when I see a report on the news about a scientific article, my first step is to seek out the article, which is no problem for me since I'm on a college campus, but many people aren't able to do so.
I appreciate your insight, and I look forward to more articles of this type. I'll be sure to keep my eyes peeled for more news items like this.
Yeah many times I have only been able to have access to the abstracts of articles without paying steep costs to view it (which I would never do both because I don't have the funds and because I think it is ridiculous). I used to work for the USPTO as a patent examiner and had access to any journal publication I needed or wanted to look at out of my own interest, but as an individual I quickly noticed how impossible it sometimes is to even read the content. This means that people with earnest interest in the subject matter are unable to even see it and have it become part of their awareness. That then leads to a drastic limiting in the flow of information.
I look at it like a river. When a river is allowed to run free, not being manipulated by the creations of man, it is able to give sustenance to all living things in its path. When we create dams, it limits the flow of the river downstream and life is no longer able to be supported. Select few benefit from the dam, having a reservoir to draw from to feed their needs, but those who do not are adversely impacted. Journals essentially create dams that harm those downstream of them in this same way.
What are you studying in grad school, if I may ask?
That's a good way to look at it. I suppose I shouldn't take my journal access for granted.
I'm in a Chemical Engineering PhD program. My focus is on materials, specifically polymeric membranes for desalination. My current project is very similar to this.
Hopefully it is free access sooner or later. It seems they become more available as they age as well, I can definitely access a lot through the google scholar search. But that is a bit later than when the research is actually done which would of course be optimal.
Nice I have a B.S. in chemical engineering, can't say I'm really knowledgeable at all in it though haha. Are you working on carbon nanotube technology in general or specifically with regard to water filtration applications? A lot of that paper is above my understanding but I can get tidbits from it..ha.
Yes. Google scholar has been a valuable tool of late. Sometimes it works better than searching my university's library website. haha
No worries on the paper, I'd be happy to summarize for you. I've gotten very good at it. Reverse osmosis (RO) technology dates back to the late 1950s, when cellulose acetate (CA) membranes were developed. However, CA membranes require very high pressures to separate salt effectively, so they only get around 60% of the salt out. This means you have to run the water through the RO process many times to get to a tolerable level of salt.
Enter John Cadotte's patent in 1978 for a "thin-film composite" membrane, which instead of being made of one polymer (like CA), it's made of three. A base support layer usually made of PET fibers (the plastic that soda bottles are made of), a second layer that is very water permeable (made of polysulfone), and the top layer, which is responsible for the salt rejection. His design featured an aromatic polyamide, and since I'm sure you probably paid as much attention in organic chemistry as I did, it's not far chemically from Kevlar, except instead of a fiber, it forms a crosslinked network of polymer. Inside the network are pores that are large enough for water molecules to pass through, but small enough that salt ions can't, hence they reject salt very nicely, usually 99% of it. They require much lower pressures, too, so you don't have to use as much energy in the RO process.
These membranes work well. So well, in fact, that the technology hasn't changed. Large RO plants still use membranes based on Cadotte's 1978 design. My group's goal is to manipulate his existing design in order to get better performance, that is, we want to increase the amount of water that can be processed over a given area of the membrane at a time without sacrificing the 99% salt rejection.
Here's where the nanoparticles come in. We basically add nanoparticles such as carbon nanotubes into the top selective layer of the membrane and test the performance. We're currently working with cellulose nanocrystals (Google those, they're quite interesting) since they're much more economically viable than carbon nanotubes.
If we can improve the membranes' performance, we can reduce the energy cost of running an RO process, as well as hopefully provide more access to clean water. And as you know, as a chemical engineer, I'm also interested in the actual transport properties of the materials at the interface between the polymer and the nanoparticle. So there's a lot going on.
Anyhow, that's a summary of a typical PhD project. I've had some good results so far, but nothing groundbreaking. It's been a very enjoyable project, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the results take me. I'm actually giving a talk on my project at the upcoming ACS meeting in Washington, D.C. this month, so I'm excited about that.
Thanks for your interest. I'm sure I just gave you more information than you probably wanted, but I love my work, and I want other people to be aware of what kind of neat things are going on in academic research. Please let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. (Plus it helps me prepare for possible questions when I'm giving a talk).
Thanks for your thorough response! It was very informative. Do you make the membranes then? Have you tried a wide array of different compositions/particle sizes/etc. and methods for adding the nanoparticles?
How pure does the water become after this process typically? In other words, does it essentially become distilled water without nutrients? I don't know the specific differences between fresh water and salt water to say what type of other "helpful" components might exist in the water, but is there any difference between the resulting water of desalinated RO water and RO fresh water?
Of course! I'm always happy to elaborate on my research to anyone!
In the lab, I only "make" one part of the membranes: the top selective layer that's made out of the aromatic polyamide. The bottom two layers we purchase from DOW Chemical in a roll. They make it better than anyone else, and I can't emulate their process in the lab. The exact procedure for how I deposit the nanoparticles is in the paper I shared with you a few comments above. I mix two chemicals that polymerize and form the crosslinked selective membrane layer, which hopefully encompasses the nanoparticles.
Lately, I've been using cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), so as far as size, they typically are around 100 nm in length and 10-15 nm in width, so quite small. I don't vary the particle sizes, but I do vary the amount of them I add into each membrane. We can also vary the functional groups on the ends of the CNCs (a plain cellulose molecule has two primary -C-OH groups which can be substituted for other groups via specific chemistry.) So just to sum all of that up, because I know there are many concepts in there that I could take a whole post to explain, yes, I vary different parameters in order to try to achieve better results. We're working on a publication of my work, so hopefully I'll be able to share that in the near future.
To address your question about the water purity, RO is typically used for seawater, but it's also used to purify "brackish water" from sources such as marshes. The concentration of salt is much different between the two. Brackish water usually contains around 2000 ppm of sodium ions (2000 mg/L), while seawater can be anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 ppm. The pressures necessary to perform RO on seawater are huge, and my pump system I have in the lab can't get that high, so we test all of our membranes on brackish water (~2000 ppm Na+). For my lab testing, I just put salt in deionized water, shake it up, and then use that as a feedstock for my RO system. Nothing special. Right now, we're only interested in their performance rejecting salt. A plain polyamide RO membrane based on the 1978 Cadotte design can reject upwards of 99% of the salt, so you'd be left with less than 20 ppm of Na+. In the membrane literature, this is generally considered the gold standard.
Fresh water generally doesn't need to be run through an RO process since the salt concentration is already low enough that you can't notice saltiness when you drink it. However, RO is used in wastewater treatment often because it can remove anything larger than sodium ions with just one pass. It can't be the only step, though, because RO membranes don't deal with bacteria and other contaminants.
I hope this helped address your questions. Thanks so much for asking!
Trade journals is one of those money making devices out in education. Unfortunately it's a high cost. Those fees are excessive though. Many like elsevier have street values of several million dollars, but are discounted to pretty much zero for use in top tier universities. That's done so that any research performed using these databases can be referenced. The org's that typically pay retail for these are the individual and businesses. The Sci-hub site was a short lived thing because the research published through these sites are now copyrighted and intellectual property of the company. Thanks for the post!!