5 ms·
I personally do see an issue if we make knowledge only accessible to a minority of people. In my field (microbiology/bioinformatics), it's almost impossible to
by folli 9y ago
I personally do see an issue if we make knowledge only accessible to a minority of people.
In my field (microbiology/bioinformatics), it's almost impossible to find pre-prints of pay walled papers and emailing the authors and hoping that they will respond at all also doesn't seem an extremely efficient process for literature research.
- chasedehan 9y agoMaybe I am biased by my field - economics - in which even having "access" doesn't mean they are "accessible." There are very very few people without a PhD who are able to understand most of the good papers. There is an even smaller number who would be able to contribute to scientific discourse, which is the main reason these papers are made available. The other thing that may only be localised to my field is that every author recognizes this problem and makes a copy available on their website or university's working paper site. I would only rarely resort to going to an actual journal because Google Scholar was way easier to find a copy of the article. This is, of course, going to differ for a number of fields and there is a growing trend for authors and journals to open up their articles.