I was all set to make a grand post on reddit on why scientific research isn’t publicly accessible. Type type type, submit, “the link you are commenting on has been deleted.” Moderation, sometimes you suck. (I kid.) But it’s a shame to waste four perfectly good paragraphs, so here you go:

Why is scientific research hidden from the public by paywalls?

First, let’s be clear on one thing: the “public” that scientific research is hidden from is not nonscientists. So it’s not like scientists are involved in some conspiracy to keep their results out of public scrutiny. Paywalls — the restriction of having to pay a fee to read a scientific article — hide research from the “public” that is anyone who hasn’t paid to access it. That includes other scientists. Yes, any time you’ve wanted to read a paper and been blocked by a paywall, I guarantee that some scientist has already had the exact same experience and has been even more pissed off about it than you.

The reason we have paywalls at all is largely historical. In the olden days before the internet, scientific research was shared primarily through printed journals. Scientists would send their papers in to the journal’s editors, the editors would review the submissions and select the best ones to include in the printed issue, and then the printed issue would be mailed out or otherwise delivered to the global community of scientists. As you can imagine, this process is pretty expensive. Between the costs of paper and ink and binding, and the costs of shipping many thousands of copies of these journals around the world, it took a lot of money to run a journal. Publishers and scientists alike had a keen interest in making sure anyone who benefited from the journal was contributing some money toward its operation, so copyright law and subscription systems were developed to make sure people paid.

Now that internet access is so prevalent, we find ourselves in a different situation. Distributing papers over the internet is a cheap and easy alternative to distributing them through printed journals, so a lot of people are giving up on journal subscriptions and switching to online-only access. That means the print journal publishers get less money from subscription fees, which in turn means they have to jack up costs and use more aggressive measures to prevent copying and redistribution of the articles they publish. (At least, that’s the argument the publishers make.)

You might wonder, if journals are so expensive, why don’t we just dump them and publish everything freely online? That’s a good idea, but the one problem is that journals still have a perceived monopoly on the process of peer review. In other words, many scientists are still of the mindset that a paper hasn’t been properly critiqued and thus isn’t fully trustworthy unless it’s gone through a journal’s peer review process. This makes it a risky endeavor for any individual scientist to say “I’m going to bypass the journals” because their papers will no longer be taken seriously (unless the particular scientist is already a leader in their field). Journal publishers know this and have used it to keep their system of subscriptions operating, even though many people would argue it’s no longer relevant.

There is a decently strong movement towards making scientific research fully open access - this would mean changing the definition of “published” in the public mind so that any published research is available to anyone who wants to read it at no cost and without restriction. (Check out the #openscience and #openaccess hashtags on Twitter, for example.) This is not something that we can really expect to happen very soon, but there is already some progress on that front. Many journals make some of their papers freely available, either with payment of a fee from the author or at the editors’ discretion. Some journals are entirely open-access, which means they don’t require a login or payment to read any article they publish. And there are some attempts to supplement or bypass the journal system entirely, like arXiv which hosts preprints (pre-publication drafts) of nearly all papers written in many branches of physics and math.