3 ms·
Ask HN: Why do we have to pay to read research funded from public funds?
How did the academic and especially the medical sector come to a point that studies conducted by university hospitals and phd doctors are behind paywalls when it's a matter of public health?
Is anyone doing anything about it? YC?
- itamarst 8y agoCapitalism turns public funding into a way to extract private profits.
- moviuro 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651419 and many more in recent HN posts...
- pubmed1223 8y agoOfficially there is a policy that NIH funded research must be publicly available on the NIH repository (pubmed) within 1 year of a papers acceptance [1]. How this remains enforced is a different question. Not sure how relevant it is to other government funding sources. Also, a surprisingly, large amount of academic research is not strictly publicly funded. [1]https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753 https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753
- tonysdg 8y agoIf there's a particular paper you're interested in, you can usually email the lead author(s) and just ask for a copy. I've never heard of someone saying no, especially since it's as easy as emailing a PDF. As for the why -- just DuckDuckGo "why is science behind a paywall" and you'll get a million hits, each author giving a slightly tweaked definition of "it's a holdover from the days of publishing in print journals".
- Someone 8y agoHow? See https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
- Rjevski 8y agoBecause shitty companies like Elsevier still want to stick around even though their purpose was obsoleted by the Internet, and are using their influence to try and achieve that.