Science, knowledge, and intellectual property: Ten years later. Part 2

Abstract

The second part of the article is devoted to some economic aspects of the activity of academic institutions involved not only in the production of knowledge, but also in its proliferation. The leading role in this process belongs to scientific journals, which represent the main channel of knowledge dissemination. The article substantiates the special type of costs of such journals, related to the payment of royalties as a fee for obtaining the rights to print and distribute the author’s texts in the form of journal articles, as well as a known part of the publisher’s costs due to the payment for reviewers’ labor, which is the most important element of journal production. It is shown that under the current conditions, journals, as a rule, do not have funds to pay for reviewing and royalties. Gradually, “free” assignment of copyright became the norm in the system of knowledge dissemination, with the negative consequences of the appearance of journals that charge authors for the publication of their texts. Taking this into account, the peculiarities of financing the production of knowledge, which acts as a public good, as well as the dissemination of knowledge in the form of journal publications, which requires public funding in the form of meritorious budget subsidies, are considered. The proposed recommendations apply not only to the state financing of production and dissemination of knowledge, but also to the implementation of the necessary institutional reforms to restore the status of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a self-governing organization of civil society with the return of all scientific institutions to its fold.