The ‘pay-to-publish’ model should be abolished

Scholarly journals have become increasingly expensive and unaffordable, whether for individuals or for libraries.This has been exacerbated by the enormous increase in the numbers of published articles and therefore in the per-capita consumption necessary for scholarly activity.The arrival of digital publishing and the Internet have magnified these numbers almost beyond imagination.Funders of scholarly activity, be they government or private, have begun to complain that they have to pay twice-first to produce the research and then to read it, while profits go largely to commercial publishers.It therefore appears that the traditional 'publish-for-free and pay-to-read' model will no longer work.It has appeared for some time that there is a simple alternative-flip the model and make it 'pay-to-publish and read-for free'.Buoyed by the politically attractive label 'open access', this model has spread very rapidly and taken on many forms.I argue that the 'pay-to-publish and read-for-free' model (hereafter 'pay-to-publish' model) has far more serious problems.Including publication costs within research grants is being widely advocated and implemented but it seems to be not so widely recognized that funders still pay twice-first to produce the research and then to publish it, and profits still go largely to commercial publishers.Since funders pay twice in the old model and continue to pay twice in the new model, one might be tempted to think that at least the new model is not any worse than the old one.But it is much worse, for at least two reasons.First, the pay-to-publish model makes the playing field even more uneven for scholars; those from less well-endowed institutions and poor countries will suffer even more because the quantum of grants required to do research and publish it is now greater than it was before.As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, poor countries and poor scholars will be doomed to remain knowledge consumers (since they can read-for-free) rather than become knowledge producers (since they have to pay-to-publish)-generating and perpetuating a form of knowledge hegemony incompatible with self-respect and equal participation. 1 Second, and perhaps even more serious, the 'pay-to-publish' model is inherently unstable.In the language of evolutionary biology, it is 'susceptible to cheating'.Nothing prevents