Why learned society journals stick to paywalls?

 

Just returned from an excellent conference of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) in Barcelona. There was a lot of excellent science there, but I also learnt why many of my colleagues are sceptical about making society-owned journals fully open access. The key is that the main income of ESEB (an probably also other societies) is from its Journal of Evolutionary Biology, which is a pay-walled subscription journal. So majority society members seem to be OK with the current model because library subscription deals bring money to ESEB, allowing it to run many nice programmes and reduce membership fees. But this model means, as I mentioned in my previous blog, that we grossly overpay (with taxpayers money) for publishing our results, and only some publishers bring only a part of their income back to learned societies. Most of what libraries pay goes to publishers, who use it to compete with other publishers and to secure fat profits for themselves. This 85% could be saved and spent more productively, e.g. on research, education, you name it! So if learned societies want us to publish in their journals, they should to take an effort to change their current policy. Maybe a way to go is for funders to sponsor societies and their journals directly, as they do for example in the case of Peer Community In. I think we should all lobby for this!