Australian Politics
‘Exorbitant’ fees paid to academic publishers better spent on Australian research and education, report finds
This is certainly a problem. The top journals can basically charge what they like. Any inability to access them would greatly hinder research
Australia’s public research institutions are paying $1bn a year to giant academic publishers, new research shows, amid growing calls for taxpayer money to be redirected away from private enterprises.
The Australia Institute report, released on Wednesday, questioned if more public money should be used for research and education instead of being directed to international academic publishers.
Academic publishes are among the most profitable businesses in the world – raking in massive profit margins approaching 40% – in line with Google and Apple.
The market is dominated by five major houses – Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE Publications – and rakes in billions of dollars a year.
The report found Australia’s research institutions and universities spent $300m on journal subscriptions annually, totalling $1bn when additional fees and publication charges were added.
The “exorbitant” fees are charged to institutions and research groups in order to access research that the public largely funds, the report said. One-off access for a single article costs about $50.
Dr Kristen Scicluna, a postdoctoral research fellow and author of the report, said research was being “hamstrung” without appropriate funding and money could be better directed elsewhere.
“This amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars every year – much of it public money – spent on publication and subscription, not research and discovery,” she said.
Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, has proposed a world-first open access model, recently finalised for the federal government, that would provide a centralised digital library for all Australians to access research papers free of charge, as long as they had a MyGov account or were in education.
Scicluna said Foley’s plan was a “great start” but did not go far enough, instead pressing for reform as to how research grants were awarded.
“It doesn’t do much to disrupt entrenchment publishers have on academic workflow,” she said.
Scicluna’s proposal includes revising grant criteria to reward publication in open access journals that have lower publishing fees and trialling a lottery-based grant system to reduce the power of major journals.
Australia’s two major public grant bodies – the Australian Research Council (Arc) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) – require publications to be open access, with stipulations in place. But receiving a grant depends on an academic’s track record, typically based on whether they have published in prestigious journals.
Scicluna said until grant conditions offered academics alternative avenues for promotion, private publishers would continue to benefit.
The lottery system has been trialled in New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Australia and Switzerland to some success. Grant applications are first screened for eligibility, then awarded randomly to applicants considered equal, to reduce the emphasis on a researcher’s publication record.
“Publishers can just keep increasing prices, so [the] funding universities get through the government to cover the costs of research, salaries and equipment end[s] up going to library subscription fees.”
In Australia, the Council of Australian University Librarians has taken the lead on negotiating open-access agreements on behalf of institutions. The council’s executive director, Jane Angel, said the need for reform came down to equity.
Angel said not advancing open access particularly hindered innovation among people without access to paywalled information – primarily, those outside educational institutions.
“That either predicates that innovation comes or is perpetuated among those who are tertiary educated, or suggests that this is where we expect to find innovation,” she said.
“That is not democratic or progressive, or indicative of the Australia [the education minister] Jason Clare wants where ‘no one is held back, and no one is left behind’.”
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Getting to net zero without nuclear power condemns us to poverty
Our energy debate, here and globally, is one of the most consequential discussions in human history. That it is distorted by politicking, virtue signalling and delusion can be explained only by widespread ignorance about what is at stake.
It is pointless to contest the proposition that we need to transition away from a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. They are a finite resource and if our civilisation is to continue in anything approximating its current form this transition is unavoidable sometime.
The point of contestability is the urgency – probably overstated by many players. Still, let us put that argument aside and look at the overwhelming scale of the task. If we understand how energy has underpinned the development of our economies and societies, and how we rely on it, we could never be blase about transitioning from fossil fuels. We are talking about the reversal of the whole trajectory and achievement of our development across just a few decades.
We are being urged to up-end the relentless intensification of energy in favour of energy devolution or diffusion. This flips all we know about the core driver of our civilisation and, if it must be done, it needs to be done carefully with all possible technologies on the table.
Our journey from forager to influencer is all about the availability of increasingly intense sources of energy. The hunter-gather relied only on the energy of the human form, fuelled by the vegetable and animal matter of other organisms.
By controlling fire, domesticating animals and harnessing wind and water, we greatly leveraged our energy options. But none of this was enough to sustain cities or deliver widespread wealth.
Fossil fuels changed everything, driving transport and generating electricity. For thousands of years the global population grew very slowly and lived mostly in poverty. Across the past 250 years the population has increased tenfold, we have developed unfathomable wealth and technology, all the while more than doubling life expectancy and reducing poverty.
Energy was the driving force, and the consequences extend way beyond the economic.
In a new short film for Net Zero Watch, John Constable explains the impact: “That exponential increase in wealth from high-quality fuels led to a society that could withstand external shocks that would have been catastrophic for earlier populations. It was the beginnings of modernity.”
Constable is seen as a controversial figure in the climate debate, the sort derided as a denier by alarmists and renewables zealots. But his historical perspective is uncontrovertible.
Apart from transport, heating and cooling, industrialisation, appliances, entertainment and communications devices, consider what energy has done for humanity. In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil details how even in the early part of the 20th century most of the world faced poverty and food shortages. Rising food production – fuelled largely by fossil fuels and techniques dependent on them – led to a decline in global malnutrition from two in three people in 1950 to less than one in 10 now. And because this occurred while the global population more than tripled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to eight billion in the 2020s, it means we are feeding eight times as many people as we did 70 years ago.
We mess with this formula at our own peril. What has been fuelled by dense forms of energy can continue only if replacement energy is available, otherwise much more will have to change, and likely for the worse.
Constable talks about other knock-on effects, describing how Britain’s population became larger and richer and therefore more secure and innovative: “Wealth creates freedom, which creates more wealth, which creates yet more freedom and more wealth.”
He fails to offer a long-term solution, preferring to warn of potentially dire and chaotic consequences if we shun reliable and affordable energy: “Everything that humans value is in jeopardy.”
Labor, the Greens and their barrackers in public debate have their hands over their eyes, ears and mouths. For them, the world’s only reliable, baseload, zero-emissions fuel source is an evil whose role they refuse to see, hear or consider.
This is confounding when green-left politicians in Europe have long embraced nuclear and 22 leading economies at the COP28 conference in Dubai last December pledged to triple their nuclear energy output.
The green left in Australia shuns modernity for sham reasons; it cites only cost but this cannot be genuine given its lack of interest in the costs of renewables and clear evidence that many nations are reaping price benefits from nuclear. The costs of not developing a domestic nuclear industry need to be confronted. We would consign ourselves to a more sparse and vulnerable electricity grid that damages environments and landscapes. It also would face permanently high transmission and energy storage costs.
We would turn our backs on a hi-tech industry that plays a role in all modern economies and we would do this while attempting to run (and build) nuclear-propelled submarines. Madness. We also would surrender energy security, undermining economic fundamentals. Australia’s strategic rivals would encourage us to eschew nuclear and persist with our renewables plus storage experiment (especially if they buy our coal, gas and iron ore while selling us wind turbines and solar panels).
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull posted on X about the nuclear debate, asserting that nuclear could not “firm” renewable energy such as wind and solar. “To firm them we need flexible, dispatchable sources of zero emission energy such as pumped hydro, batteries or green hydrogen,” Turnbull said. “Nuclear reactors cannot turn on and off, ramp up and down like hydro or batteries can. Nuclear reactors generate continuously.”
And he said that like it is a bad thing. Nuclear would stabilise our grid with constant power and at times of low demand there might be little need for renewables. Perhaps that is why renewable investors, including in green hydrogen, are so antagonistic to nuclear. Excess power from a nuclear plant at times of low demand might be used to generate hydrogen or desalinate seawater. Next Turnbull will criticise drip irrigation because it invariably leads to moist soil.
Another film from Britain caught my attention this week. It was an old newsreel-style update on the 1956 commissioning of Britain’s (and the world’s) first commercial nuclear reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria. Over wonderful black-and-white footage of workers toiling away on gargantuan cement and steel installations, there is a voice-over in well-modulated King’s English that has a hint of derring-do in the delivery.
“Far below, work started on the intricate task of creating the heart of the reactor furnace, to draw heat from the new fuel of the atomic age,” we are told. Yep, they were proud. Here was a damaged and straitened post-war nation justifiably taking pride in its industry and innovation – it built the reactor in less than three years. Compare that to our negativity and self-doubt.
The green left here argues all this technology is beyond us and that we should build wind farms and power lines across the country while we leave the rest of the world to modernise, and just hope for the best. It is a scientific cringe.
In an extraordinary interview on Tuesday Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 730 harangued opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien for daring to suggest this nation could deliver a nuclear plant inside 12 years and do it in a costly manner. Apparently, this can happen only overseas.
Yet the same host spoke with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last November and when he claimed to be turning Australia into a “renewable energy superpower” they both managed to keep straight faces.
Facts and science have lost relevance in favour of ideology and sanctimony.
Science tells us, as the International Energy Agency concludes, that current technologies cannot deliver net zero by 2050. Neither can net zero be delivered without nuclear energy. Yet the government’s pretence continues, and the Greens and the media cheer. Just this week Anthony Albanese hailed a company investing $44m in electric trucks – but taxpayers tipped in almost half ($20m) and no one mentioned none of this would be possible without coal-generated power.
Turnbull and Bowen complain about timelines and costs for nuclear while somewhere underneath the Snowy Mountains lies a bedevilled tunnelling machine called Florence that Turnbull set to work on what was supposed to be a $2bn, five-year project but that will cost $20bn across at least 10 years and will provide only some energy storage if we are lucky.
Around the country communities are objecting to renewable projects and the transmission lines to connect them – legal and political battles are enjoined. Little wonder renewable energy investment, despite being favoured by laws, subsidies and market rules, is starting to drop off.
Bowen is set to trump a long list of failed energy ministers. One of the key considerations on election timing will be energy – can Labor risk an election early next year if there is a threat of blackouts from December through to March?
We know what a zero-emissions environment looks like – South Australia lived it for a day during the 2016 statewide blackout that occurred only because of how vulnerable the renewables push had made them. We saw what a low-emissions world looks like too, during the pandemic – people staying home, empty shopping centres, empty CBDs, empty airports, empty streets and empty skies.
The challenge for the world is keeping businesses open and skies busy while getting emissions to zero. It is unclear whether this is even possible. But it is certainly not possible without nuclear energy.
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Influencer Abbey O’Hagan reveals housing issue impacting single Aussies
I am a bit unsympathetic about this. Why does she not get a bloke? She is attractive so would have a wide choice
Ms O’Hagan, 24, lives on her own in Brisbane and pays $500 for the pleasure. To afford her hefty rent she works full-time as a social media and PR manager and is a successful influencer with over 70,000 followers on Instagram.
A few years ago, she would have easily been able to afford her own place, but now, living alone is becoming increasingly impossible for her – a fact she shared on social media.
In a video that has been viewed over 100,000 times, Ms O’Hagan said her rent has increased by $100 per week.
As she lives alone, she has no one to share that financial burden with, and this reality has left her horrified.
“I basically have two weeks to figure out what I’m doing and I just don’t even know what to do,” she said.
The response to her video was mixed.
While plenty of people in the comment section commiserated with O’Hagan’s situation, others were quick to remind her that living alone in 2024 just isn’t an option for many young people.
Someone said that she can’t afford to be “picky.” Another said that “no one lives on their own anymore,” and one person advised her to get a housemate.
Rents in Australia have continued to soar in 2024 and according to Rent.com.au the national median rent for just a room has increased by 16.03 per cent.
O’Hagan told news.com.au that she found some of the feedback frustrating, especially comments that told her to get a housemate or move into a sharehouse.
“People can say, ‘Just get a roommate,’ but no one has an idea of that person’s situation, what they suffer from, or how living alone is truly the best option for them,” she said.
After looking online at other housing options, she still couldn’t find one that was within her price range.
“Why is there not one single apartment for someone that wants to live on their own and have a carpark? Why is that so impossible?” She asked.
The PR manager said that after checking she realised she earns a salary higher than average in Brisbane, but still couldn’t find somewhere within budget that was “liveable”. She also shared that paying $600 a week in rent as a single person is tough.
“I love living here and the thought of leaving is really depressing,” she said.
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Fury erupts as defence chiefs strip brave veterans of their medals just before Anzac Day - and give a 'reprehensible' reason for it
Unbelievable. Just nasty bureaucracy
Military veterans have slammed defence chiefs after they were bizarrely stripped of medals over a 'technicality' just weeks before Anzac Day.
Some members of the HMAS Manoora were awarded an Australian Active Service Medal (AASM) in 2014 for their work in providing humanitarian aid and arms transpiration in East Timor throughout 2000.
Despite a decade of proudly wearing and displaying the AASM, the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal has suddenly stripped crew members of the award.
The move came after other members of HMAS Manoora later applied for the same medal after they were on the same missions but were turned down by the tribunal.
The decision has been branded 'reprehensible' by fellow veterans who have called on Defence Minister, Richard Marles, for an immediate response.
The crew were stripped of their medals because they were technically 'not force assigned to the original task group or operation' because they had been brought in on 'short notice', 2GB reports.
A letter to the crew members who have had their AASMs stripped recommended they 'don't wear the medal, the associated ribbon and the return from service badge' until Mr Marles ruled on the matter.
'I'm told by one of the crew, there is no dispute that the ship was in the war zone for the prescribed time and was participating in warlike operations at the time,' Ben Fordham told listeners.
'This could be fixed retrospectively by giving the remaining crew an AASM but instead they want to take back the medals they've already approved.'
A fourth-generation digger, whose family's service dates back to the Gallipoli campaign in WW1, said it was 'hard to believe' he was asked to hand in his medal.
'How do I explain this to members of my RSL sub-branch when a medal suddenly disappears? Veterans notice these things,' he said.
'How do I explain this to my children who are also very proud of their military history?'
Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence and ex-serviceman injured in Afghanistan, Phillip Thompson, said the decision was 'disgraceful'. 'There will be veterans listening to this around the world,' he told 2GB.
'This is a government saying "thank you for your service, now give us back your medal". 'What the Honours and Awards should have done is awarded every person on that ship the same award.'
Mr Thompson said the Defence Minister 'has been briefed' on the matter and should 'act today' to curtail anxiety for those affected.
'We are moving into Anzac Day and this is a very stressful and challenging time for many of our veterans including myself,' he said.
'You reflect on your service, you reflect on the friends you've lost. 'And we're going to have veterans (asking) "Should I be wearing this? Do I deserve the medals that I worked for and earned?".'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13216425/HMAS-Manoora-medals-anzac-day.html
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
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