Academia.edu's Richard Price: "The end of the paywall"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Technology, Business Analysis, Silicon Valley, Interviews, Tech, News, Artificial Intelligence, Ai, Business, Business News

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Richard Price, founder of Academia.edu, yo talk about how academic publishing works today (4:00), doing to publishing what Napster did to music (6:15) starting out with banana cakes (7:20), raising his first round of money (11:45), going from 50 sign-ups-a-day to 72m users (12:30), getting to 20m research papers uploaded (14:15), taking on a centuries-old business model (15:45), the importance of prestige (19:55), quality control (21:05), the last bastion in publishing untouched by the Internet (25:30), and bankrolling free access with a core of subscribers (28:15). PLUS: Jeffery Mackie-Mason, head librarian at the University of California, comes on to talk about his showdown with Elsevier over the publisher’s “extortionary” prices (32:10), how subscription rates have soared (35:05), unleashing scientific progress (37:15), playing hardball (39:00), how publishing giants have defended their turf (40:45), reaching a tipping point (42:45), the publishers beginning to break ranks (46:10), and the key to the traditional players’ power (47:15).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.5	I would say that more and more there's a consensus emerging,
0:07.4	the open access is the way to go.
0:09.7	The relatively soon all the papers will be freely accessible.
0:13.2	There's so much demand from the academics and the funding agencies about that
0:17.6	that I think that it's pretty hard to see a world where the pay will possess and survives.
0:22.4	Really dramatically affecting the value of what the public is paying for.
0:27.3	The public is paying for most of the research, but most people can't actually read the results
0:31.8	of that research.
0:45.1	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech. We're doing something a little bit different this week.
0:48.2	We're going to go dive into a world that most of you probably don't think about, but it is actually quite important to the world as we know it.
0:57.0	And that world is academic publishing.
1:01.0	So, a quick summary.
1:03.0	There's about 25,000 journals for scientists, researchers, professors, etc.
1:09.0	published papers on everything that they're working on from
1:11.8	climate change, cancer research, and everything in between.
1:15.1	These journals are basically the top of the funnel.
1:18.2	They're the broadcast medium for scientists who get the word out on what they're working on,
1:23.1	the advances they've made, kind of like a first link in a chain that others will build on, and then
1:28.6	eventually leading to something quite fabulous that we will all benefit from. But what you may not
1:34.3	know is that the industry is controlled by a very small handful of companies, the biggest of which
	...

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