Special Screening of “Paywall”

Free Ticket available: bit.ly/paywallscreening

Many researches are publicly funded, and even when researches are funded by a private organization, they tend to be selected based on their foreseeable impact on the public good.

Yet, the findings of those researches are often not publicly available. Those who seek the most up-to-date research findings, unless they are affiliated with university or other institution that has contract with large academic publishers, they hit the paywall asking them to pay $30+ per article.

This not only prevents publicly valuable information to circulate freely and quickly, but also reproduces global inequity—the access to knowledge continues to be walled for those who cannot afford the up-to-multi-million-dollar subscriptions.

How can we make publicly funded researches publicly accessible? What kind of counter movements have there been? What are the obstacles for changes to happen?

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship explores such questions.

Watch the Trailer:

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship investigates the economic and societal impact of academic publishing, the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier, and how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable technology companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google.

We are extremely excited to have the director of the film, Dr. Jason Schmitt, at our screening and engage with us in the post-screening discussion.

Everyone is welcome.

Get your free ticket today: bit.ly/paywallscreening

 

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We respectfully acknowledge that this event takes place on the Unceded, Traditional, Ancestral Territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nations.