Paywall: The Business of Scholarship film screening

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

Does the high cost of access to scholarly literature interfere with the advancement of research and innovation? Join us for a film screening and discussion on the business behind for-profit  scholarly publishing and the rise of open access options.

• Monday, October 22
• 3:30-5:30 pm
• The Marquee Cinema, Union South

In the spirit of open access, film screening and popcorn provided free of charge.

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship “is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. View the film trailer here!

Following the film, there will be a Q&A with a panel of scholarly publishing experts from UW-Madison. Panelists include:

• Karl Broman, Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics
• Toni Gunnison, Journals Manager, UW Press
• Dorothea Salo, Faculty Associate, iSchool
• Doug Way, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Research

Planning on attending? Let your friends know about this event too by sharing it on Facebook!

More Information on Open Access

Want to learn more about Open Access and scholarly publishing before seeing the film? Check out these resources:

Related Readings

About the Film/Reviews

• Open Access–The Movie, Richard Poynder, Nature
• Open Access at the Movies, Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed
• Documentary “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” Premieres in Washington, DC, Judy Ruttenberg, ARL Policy Notes

On Sci-Hub

• Think Sci-Hub is Just Downloading PDFs? Think again, Andrew Pitts, The Scholarly Kitchen
• We’ve failed: Pirate black open access is trumping green and gold and we must change our approach, Toby Green, Learned Publishing
• Should All Research Papers Be Free?, Kate Murphy, New York Times

On Publishing Books/Monographs

• The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology.” Nancy L. Maron, , et al. “Ithaka S+R.
• Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) information page from Association for Research Libraries