Anything funded by taxpayers should be open-access to the people who paid for it. Period.
And that means everything. In climate papers of ten and twenty years ago there were climate scientists who would claim techniques or software were proprietary. That may be but if they were-taxpayer funded, it's not their property.
That said, here is a fine use of open-access in the journal Nature. A paper by Northumbria University's Órla Meadhbh Murray:
Crip guts, stomas, and the violence of ‘returning to normal’: a feminist queer crip approach to the gut
I wouldn't pay for it but some folks might want to read it. On the other hand...*
And from UnDark, January
Publishers often charge authors to publish their publicly-funded research. Will a federal crackdown make a difference?
In the spring of 2024, Ali Kharrazi, then an editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, or CRSUST, received a routine request to review several papers. Although guest editors had already recommended accepting the work, something unusual stood out. One of the papers included the phrase: “The way to foster love is by cultivating disruption.”
Kharrazi did not think the article had any place in a scientific journal, much less one where he was named as an editor. Plus, by his account, the paper lacked a well-developed methods section, a key part of any scientific article where the authors detail the exact procedure of their study. Despite what Kharrazi saw as shortcomings, he said another editor-in-chief at the journal, Brenda Lin, wanted to accept the paper — in part because the article had been co-authored by one of three guest editors. As Kharrazi, who studies environmental sustainability at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, described it in an email to Undark, it all seemed “less like editorial oversight and more like carrying water for a network trying to sneak in subpar papers.” (Lin did not respond to requests for comment.)
“It was talking about love,” Kharrazi said. “It had nothing to do with serious science. They went to a workshop, talked about some random thing, and they were trying to turn that into a paper. It was just bonkers.” (The paper’s co-author, Bruce Goldstein, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote in an email that his submitted manuscript had a methods section, which he and his co-author strengthened prior to publishing elsewhere. Goldstein noted that he could not comment on confidential editorial decisions at CRSUST.)
Kharrazi resigned from his position at the journal in May 2025. The current co-editor-in-chief, Magnus Moglia, disputed Kharrazi’s characterization of the journal, noting via email: “[W]hat he describes does largely not align with my experience. I have not been encouraged at any point to accept low quality papers.” Rebecca Clear, a spokesperson at the scientific publishing house Elsevier, which publishes the journal, did not answer specific questions about the publishing process, but provided a statement that said in part: “At Elsevier, high quality is of the utmost importance” and that the publisher routinely rejects submissions “that do not reach the high standards required.”
But as Kharrazi and others see it, examples like this one reflect longstanding issues in scientific publishing, a multibillion-dollar industry dominated by for-profit publishers: Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and Sage. The publication of science is a hallmark of its reliability, and the process goes something like this: Scientists conduct research, write up their findings, and submit these manuscripts to a journal. The work typically undergoes peer review, where other experts evaluate the paper and offer comments, usually for no pay. Based on their feedback, the journal’s editors either reject or accept the paper.
The traditional business model relied on a paywall after publication — readers footed the bill, often through institutional subscriptions and libraries. In the 2000s, a radical alternative emerged: open access journals. In open access, instead of readers having to pay, the paper’s authors cover the expenses of publication. This comes in the form of an article processing charge, or an APC. On average, the fees are an estimated $2,000 to $3,000 per article in the U.S., a price that many in publishing defend. Meagan Phelan, communications director for the Science family of journals at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, a nonprofit publisher of six journals, argues that coordinating the peer review process, doing validation and image integrity checks, and data sharing all add up. “You would think publishing online could be less expensive, but there’s a lot that goes into it,” she said.
From 2019 to 2023, authors paid an estimated $8.3 billion for open access to six publishers. And critics, including Kharrazi, contend the APC model creates incentives that are at odds with high-quality science: Since volume equals profit, the model favors quantity over quality. A recent Cambridge University Press report on the issue quoted one librarian: “[T]he journal’s interest in rejecting bad science is in direct conflict with its interest in maintaining revenue.”
The APC at Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, one of some 2,900 titles published by Elsevier, is $2,620. At the journal, Kharrazi had a front row view of the APC model’s effects, and he did not like what he saw. So long as a reviewer signed off, he told Undark, whatever it was — credible research, junk science, AI-generated text — the financial incentives were to publish....
....MUCH MORE
*On the other hand, this paper by the University of Oregon's Mark Carey, et al. could command an exceptional fee among the cognoscenti. From the journal Progress in Human Geography:
Glaciers, gender, and science
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research
- Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. Email: carey@uoregon.edu
Abstract
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
- feminist glaciology
- feminist political ecology
- feminist postcolonial science studies
- folk glaciology
- glacier impacts
- glaciers and society
I Introduction
Glaciers are icons of global climate change, with common representations stripping them of social and cultural contexts to portray ice as simplified climate change yardsticks and thermometers. In geophysicist Henry Pollack’s articulation, ‘Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts’ (Pollack, 2009: 114). This perspective appears consistently in public discourse, from media to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the ‘ice is just ice’ conceptualization contrasts sharply with conclusions by researchers such as Cruikshank (2005), who asks if glaciers listen, Orlove et al. (2008b), who analyze the cultural framing of glaciers, Carey (2007), who sees an endangered species narrative applied to glaciers, Jackson (2015), who exposes how glaciers are depicted as ruins, and Sörlin (2015), who refers to the present as a cryo-historical moment because ‘ice has become historical, i.e. that ice is an element of change and thus something that can be considered as part of society and of societal concern’ (Sörlin, 2015: 327)......
And the SagePub editors tag it in such a straightforward manner.
HT: Reddit where one of the commenters mentions Sokal which we have linked to a few times.
