The only "online piracy" I see here is when Elsevier demands US$30 from you to get a copy of a paper written by scientists paid for by your tax dollars, who paid Elsevier page fees to publish it. Elsevier and similar companies are the thieves here, and they have a hell of a lot of nerve to be accusing scientists of "stealing" and "piracy" for working to create the very knowledge Elsevier shamelessly exploits. (Even Elsevier's very name is a theft: they are attempting to free-ride on the goodwill of the Elzevir family of Renaissance publishers, who have no connection with them.)
Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.
Last week linguists issued Elsevier an ultimatum, demanding fair open access for the journal Lingua [0,1]:
> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.
Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!
Agree completely with the idea of your comment, but I have to nitpick on one thing:
> So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism.
As far as we can tell, Galileo was persecuted by the Pope not because of science, but because Galileo was basically an asshole, who abused his friendship with the Pope and then kept venting out against him. The issue was strictly political. See [0] and especially the top comment[1] under the article.
Also, apparently, Galileo was right for the wrong reasons - he lucked into the right theory even though evidence available at the time didn't substantiate his views.
The title of this story alone is problematic, not just its contents, because its a sign of how wrong the conventional wisdom is on this. It accuses scientists of breaking the law with secret code-words.
A more accurate title would have been: "Scientists forced to break the law to access the research they need in order to advance scientific knowledge."
A more provocative but still accurate title would have been: "Scientific progress impeded by corporations extracting economic rents from scientists and taxpayers, to the detriment of humankind."
Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as much to blame as the publisher.
Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
I've had over 100% luck emailing papers' authors directly asking for a copy of a particular paper I've been interested in reading. I typically get a PDF emailed back to me.
I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc.
I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work.
I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.
That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers. Having to go through the rigmarole of emailing authors, waiting for a response, is a pointless waste of everybody's time. #icanhazpdf is valuable because it's usually very fast. Sci-Hub and libgen are even more valuable because they are even faster and allow search+discovery without waiting for a third person to act.
When you publish get generally get sent a stack of hard copies for distribution to whoever you feel like sending to (usually far more than you have people to send to). Sending the reprints is legal. Sending the pdf is either illegal or legal or more likely a huge grey area which as an author you can't be bothered to work out. Postage is free in most academic departments and not much harder than sending an email. Therefore many would send the hard copy...
Apologies in advance, but when I saw this link, I expected to find an article with a non-nondescript phrase ("Blue Iguana" or some such) that would tip people off to meet in an unlisted IRC room or some such.
I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time.
Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.
As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint.
The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'.
When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way. Would I download a car? Sure, if I could.
Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an 18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.
#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress.
Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote.
But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists.
They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success.
The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
>Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet.
I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet.
Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know.
People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions.
I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so.
Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download.
Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.
> I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so.
Obtaining foundational CS papers for intellectual curiosity reasons is pretty bad, they cost inane prices[0] and for that you get barely legible PDF scans of the original print. In the best case there might be some badly synchronised ORC included so you can try to select way too much text and hope you'll find what you wanted somewhere in your clipboard.
[0] ACM wants $30 for the 1965 "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notations" (two parts, $15 each, ~20 pages total)
And the things is (at least where i leave) that Uni pays the fees for the access. The money for the fees come from the govern (and EU). The same govern that also finances the research.
Basically the govern pays twice (if not more) the same thing.
Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees.
It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview" process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a side effect.
It's a shame that people whose job is to advance humanity have to spend their time dealing with crap like this.
I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
It puzzles me that the most significant problem with open access receives little mention, in discussions on HN: it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles.
This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.
The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).
That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
Fundamentally, we're talking about the dissemination of knowledge. Yes, it is copyright infringement, but calling this "piracy" immediately associates this act with both theft and brutal disregard for the law.[0] That is not what is happening here.
With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy".
> "I don't think it can be equated very easily to theft. Theft is when you take something and the owner loses possession. But in copyright infringement, you don't take anything from other people," Elbakya says. "Many university researchers need access to these papers because subscriptions are very expensive."
Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the law to get it?
This is 2015. The idea that we need to make sure a company is steeped in ill-gotten profit so that information can be disseminated is absolutely laughable.
The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
Grasping at straws is a strange way to say rolling in money. The Journals are relics for sure, but with the internet their costs went down, and they make a ton of money financed by tax-funded research.
An interesting thought! It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there, but fundamentally the problem is similar to hosting movies, TV shows or music.
This is an excellent argument for piracy as a learning tool and against the current trend in copyright law (see TPP, etc.). I really see no difference between this and someone pirating content with the intent to learn (like my teenage self). I wish our society did more to encourage the extremely few people who actually want to learn, want to better themselves, and have something to contribute to society instead of criminalizing their activities. It'd be one thing if the government provided alternatives, but at least in the US, you won't even get taught basic math properly in many schools, let alone anything that might actually stimulate minds. Is it any wonder then that the government does so much to protect the "intellectual property" (whatever that means) rights of corporations but does nothing to protect the IP rights to scientific research, including research paid for? Even a simple law, requiring government funded research to be publicly, freely available would go a long way, assuming it actually was freely available, not 'freely available for $50 / paper' or whatever the lawmakers want to redefine 'freely' to mean.
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands.
Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
If I were making a secure file request/dropoff operation, I would host a chat room on a TOR hidden service where you could ask for the material in question, and a separate file server where you could upload the file. There would be a client that encrypts the file client-side and uploads it to the service and a client that downloads and decrypts. The uploader would post a link with the key to the forum after uploading. Once the file is downloaded, it's deleted. The two services would share no data with each other and appear as two completely separate services. Of course, then you run into the problem of having to moderate the thing, since you don't want to become a facilitator of child pornography etc.
I don't see any problem with having Elsevier manage publications that prevent people from copying their content. Just as long as that content is also available elsewhere for free, if it's publicly funded research.
I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content or just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that.
A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be how hard to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?
For what it's worth, this has been going on for at least 10 years in my experience. It's existence isn't so much news to me -- but it's news that it's still around.
In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless.
For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact.
Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.
[+] [-] kragen|10 years ago|reply
Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.
[+] [-] ar-jan|10 years ago|reply
> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.
Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!
[0] https://www.facebook.com/johan.rooryck/posts/773059302822316
[1] http://www.lingoa.eu/about/aims/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/marc.vanoostendorp/posts/1020623886...
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
> So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism.
As far as we can tell, Galileo was persecuted by the Pope not because of science, but because Galileo was basically an asshole, who abused his friendship with the Pope and then kept venting out against him. The issue was strictly political. See [0] and especially the top comment[1] under the article.
Also, apparently, Galileo was right for the wrong reasons - he lucked into the right theory even though evidence available at the time didn't substantiate his views.
[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
[+] [-] cs702|10 years ago|reply
A more accurate title would have been: "Scientists forced to break the law to access the research they need in order to advance scientific knowledge."
A more provocative but still accurate title would have been: "Scientific progress impeded by corporations extracting economic rents from scientists and taxpayers, to the detriment of humankind."
Because that is what is happening.
[+] [-] Asbostos|10 years ago|reply
Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
[+] [-] PinguTS|10 years ago|reply
(Not affiliated with. Just discovered it recently and found out, that 2 of my papers very cited without my knowledge.)
[+] [-] unexistance|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CannibalHoliday|10 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that we don't have a P2P variant strictly for academia. What a boon it would be to the dissemination of knowledge.
[+] [-] fermigier|10 years ago|reply
See: https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-...
Hopefully this could end up in the Law next year.
[+] [-] mandor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xefer|10 years ago|reply
I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc.
I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work.
I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.
[+] [-] Blahah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JupiterMoon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolfgke|10 years ago|reply
Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
> https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessM...
> https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto
[+] [-] DarkLinkXXXX|10 years ago|reply
https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...
[+] [-] ckozlowski|10 years ago|reply
I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time.
Just bemused.
[+] [-] anon4|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imrehg|10 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar
[+] [-] monort|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|10 years ago|reply
Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.
[+] [-] stegosaurus|10 years ago|reply
As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint.
The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'.
When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way. Would I download a car? Sure, if I could.
Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an 18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Blahah|10 years ago|reply
Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote.
But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists.
They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success.
The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
[+] [-] cinquemb|10 years ago|reply
I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet.
Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know.
People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
[+] [-] OlafLostViking|10 years ago|reply
Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download.
Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.
[+] [-] masklinn|10 years ago|reply
Obtaining foundational CS papers for intellectual curiosity reasons is pretty bad, they cost inane prices[0] and for that you get barely legible PDF scans of the original print. In the best case there might be some badly synchronised ORC included so you can try to select way too much text and hope you'll find what you wanted somewhere in your clipboard.
[0] ACM wants $30 for the 1965 "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notations" (two parts, $15 each, ~20 pages total)
[+] [-] esseti|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asbostos|10 years ago|reply
It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview" process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a side effect.
[+] [-] dombili|10 years ago|reply
I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
[+] [-] baghira|10 years ago|reply
This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.
The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).
That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
[+] [-] mikegerwitz|10 years ago|reply
With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy".
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy
[+] [-] webXL|10 years ago|reply
Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the law to get it?
[+] [-] oxide|10 years ago|reply
The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
[+] [-] cheepin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveWalk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotkilla|10 years ago|reply
Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
[+] [-] anon4|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amateurpolymath|10 years ago|reply
His table of particularly overpriced journals in economics is dominated by Elsevier journals: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html
Hopefully we see more academics collectively abandoning such journals like Knuth and the Journal of Algorithms board and these other examples from Ted's website: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed Policy
How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?
[+] [-] masklinn|10 years ago|reply
Then again, as per your article
> Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative
And the problem outlined with TFA has little to do with peer-review, it has to do with open access which is largely orthogonal.
[+] [-] alkonaut|10 years ago|reply
I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content or just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that.
A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be how hard to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?
[+] [-] DaveWalk|10 years ago|reply
In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless.
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
[+] [-] Fomite|10 years ago|reply
For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact.
Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.