"In many countries, it's against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it - whether it's a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists - or institutions - who subscribe to journals. But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they're using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers."
"...Elsevier wouldn't comment on the case, but did give a statement to BBC Trending saying that they recognise that access and publishing options are key for researchers. The company says it provides open access journals, rental options, individual article purchases and other means of disseminating research papers."
They do, but open access is much more expensive for authors than the standard license (>$1000-2000). Individual article purchases are not a sensible alternative : it's rare to read a paper in its entirety, far more often you just need to know one particular measurement or conclusion. It's not expensive per paper but it very quickly adds up since most papers cites >~30 papers each (currently I'm working on one that cites 90, which would come to $2700 at $30 per article EDIT : And that doesn't even begin to count the number of papers I had to look at to determine that they weren't relevant, which at a minimum would double this).
The great thing about astronomy is that we have http://arxiv.org/ which provides free access to pretty much everything these days, regardless of journal license.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34572462
I'm not a real scientist but I know the problem too.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in learning stuff.
And try experiments myself.
Like building a Atomic Force microscope based on a quartztuningfork from a clock.
And so I search and read a lot of scientific papers for informations like which types are in use, the formulas and problems you have to consider.
But in the last 10years its get really hard to gain access.
Mostly because now a big numbers of papers are closed away and you have to pay 30$ for each. And for normal people that's not possible :-(
Also one problem(at least here in Germany) are university libraries
Ten years before they their open for normal persons at least for reading( so I'm the little kid I was goe in with a big block of paper and searching for all informations I need)
But today they closed for normal people without a university pass their no chance to get in :-(
So yes for me the piratecopys of such documents are getting more and more importance.
That I think is really sad
Journals have been even slower than most institutions to adapt to the reality of the internet. No-one reads printed journals any more. What matters is the content of the article, not the journal. A journal now serves as a marker, "this article conforms to a certain minimum standard of quality". The actual printout is almost pointless, but it costs a not-insignificant amount of money to typeset and produce it.
ReplyDeleteTypesetting is almost, though not quite, pointless. It's nice to have someone go through and check in minute, exacting detail for small errors of spelling, grammar, and (more importantly) correct references, but it's a little ridiculous to enforce American/British spelling and language preferences.
Ironically, most of the hard work (writing and reviewing the paper) is done by scientists as part of their job, i.e. for free. All the journal really needs to do is find an appropriate reviewer and adjudicate the process. That is valuable, but not worth the thousands of dollars some journals still charge for the process.
Some journals (such as MNRAS) make back-issues freely available after 3 years. Why they bother is anyone's guess, since everybody gets the papers off arXiv anyway. And everyone puts their paper on arXiv otherwise no-one will ever read it.
In conclusion, I do not understand the world of business.