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Those numbers seem a little disingenuous. If you work at a decent university you're not paying $20 to access every article. Plus, I'd be stunned if all the peo
by lunchladydoris 9y ago
Those numbers seem a little disingenuous. If you work at a decent university you're not paying $20 to access every article.
Plus, I'd be stunned if all the people making the citations actually read the full paper. Some papers are cited because everyone knows you need to cite them.
- Feniks 9y agoDaily reminder that universities are funded by society. As are a lot of those papers... So yes you ARE paying. Just not directly.
- lunchladydoris 9y agoI completely agree. I wasn't commenting on the thrust of the article, which I agree with, but rather the distorting figures that were used to promote it.
- SiVal 9y agoAnd if you're part of the 99% of us who AREN'T working at a university but still funding their research with taxes, we have to pay both the taxes AND the direct fees to access the papers.
- jefft255 9y agoYou rarely need to pay if you work at a university. When you're on the school network or VPN there's a way to bypass the paywall because the uni usually buys subscriptions for most journals. That does not work if you are not working in a university.
- deerpig 9y agoThe vast majority of universities outside of developed countries can't afford to pay. I work at a national university in Cambodia. I've been trying to get the ministry of education to pay for a heavily discounted account (because we're a developing country) from JSTOR for the last two years with no luck and that's just a few hundred a year. Without libgen and sci-hub we'd be really screwed.
- aalleavitch 9y agoOnly a very small segment of society can work at a university. Even a lot of PhDs are getting forced into the private sector due to the lack of available space on faculties. Anyway, just because I'm not doing basic research doesn't mean I can't benefit from reading the methods section of a research paper, particularly in this day and age where biotech, data science, and machine learning are exploding and it's actually very practical for people in the private sector to take advantage of the same technology used in cutting-edge research labs.
- lunchladydoris 9y agoI agree, and I'm encouraged by the rise of open access. When it comes to data science and machine learning in particular, there is a large amount of open access material, which is awesome. Basic biology and medical research is another story. Until we see fundamental changes in how researchers are assessed, I don't see how the situation is going to change though. But change it must, and will. Eventually.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoBut it makes them inaccessible to those of us who are longer at university. I used to read the occasional paper, usually related to something outside my degree. Those papers are all legally inaccessible to me now.
- harry8 9y agoFeel free to add up the subscriptions paid by the libraries of the 100 top universities if you feel that figure would be less disingenuous. I'm thinking it's going to be a vastly greater number of dollars for researchers to access research paid for by the public purse, but I haven't done the research to back that.
- bluetwo 9y agoJust curious if anyone know where those dollars are actually going. How much to the publisher? The University? The researchers?