Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/302559
59 BizEd May/June 2014 B E NOIT CHARTRON /TH I N KSTOCK ideas that it's like the free press in the 19th century times a million, or free radio and television of the 20th century times a thousand. With so much informa- tion widely available, why should we complain about limited access to academic research? The problem is that most of what's available for free isn't truly useful. In his 2009 book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson notes that if you give away just enough material to interest people, the serious ones will pay for the rest of it—the part that's really of value. In the case of academic publishing, the informa- tion that's free on the web includes article titles, key words, author names, publication outlets, and abstracts. Researchers choose which article to pay for depend- ing on what they hope they'll find within it. It is quite likely that some academics without access to the full articles are citing them based on abstracts only. The underlying premise of academic scholarship is that it builds on past works that are well-known and have been scrutinized by peers. But citing an article based on an abstract isn't fair scrutiny. This practice probably isn't happening frequently among faculty who work at wealthy educational institu- tions or live in countries with robust free libraries. But what if they work at less wealthy institutions or live where there is limited access to academic journals? Will their research be less thorough, causing their careers to stall? Or will they share downloaded articles with their colleagues—a possible violation of intellectual property rights? Surely these are not desirable outcomes. I have an even bigger worry. Suppose researchers locate two relevant articles. One is free online; the other one costs $24.95 to download. Because they decide to read only the free one, they aren't exposed to the counter arguments in the other article. The problem is that, as humans, we're very biased about what we choose to read—we ignore what we don't want to believe and we redefine what we don't like to make it fit our beliefs. Daniel Kahneman writes about this tendency in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The only way we will alter strongly held beliefs is to encounter evidence-based ideas developed through the scientific method, as free from cognitive biases as academics and peer reviewers can make them. When there's limited access to academic research, we don't encounter these alternative viewpoints. We never open up our minds. Possible Solutions So how do we take costs out of the research equation? The most obvious solution is to make academic jour- nals open access—at a minimum, to those employed by an academic institution; ideally, to a much broader array of interested parties. Yet this solution is naïve. Journal publishers serve an important role in the review, acceptance, and distribution of scholarly research, and open access to all articles could be devas- tating to their business models. An alternative solution—already in place at some journals—is to create a system where a professor reg- isters and provides certain credentials to a publisher in order to get open access to that publisher's other schol- arly works. Another possibility is for institutions to expand the number of journals they subscribe to and/ or reimburse their professors for costs they incur to read and publish research. Yet for some faculty, that would not be enough. In my personal experience, I often need access to up to a hundred articles when I'm starting work in a new area. Two-thirds of the articles I desire come with a cost. If I'm on campus, most of those costs are covered by my department or the library. But if I'm off-campus when I'm researching and writing, my choices are to wait until I'm back at school to read the articles, have a graduate assistant source the article on campus—or pay up. Paying up is rarely a practical concern for me. But I worry about those for whom costly access to academic research really means no access. I believe it's time for publishers and professors to engage in vigorous dia- logue about ways to make research more widely avail- able. Without such solutions, we'll have to deal with the long-term implications of pay-for-access—and what it means for academic integrity. Stephen A. Stumpf is a professor of management at Vil- lanova School of Business at Villanova University located in Pennsylvania.