3 ms·
A fairly detailed (if opinionated) answer to your question is here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openaccess_is_t.html http://www.zephor
by pbh 16y ago
A fairly detailed (if opinionated) answer to your question is here:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openaccess_is_t.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openacc...
The summary is: (1) academics have historically given away their research and reviewing work for free to (revenue seeking) journals and professional associations to get distribution and prestige, (2) this no longer makes sense with the Internet, and (3) academia, journals, and professional associations are in an awkward transition as a result.
In the meantime, just use Google Scholar and hope that you are reading something important enough that someone has possibly violated copyright and posted a version online without a paywall.
- clp16 16y agoGoogle Scholar isn't an answer to the free publications question.
- pbh 16y agoAdmittedly, the OP is not very clear. There could be at least three questions, based on the headline, the body text question, and the example URLs cited: (1) "Why are journals not open access?" (2) "Where can I get free copies of academic articles?" (3) "What open access journals/preprint servers exist?" My response attempted to answer (1) and (2) with "most journals/conferences are ultimately not interested in dissemination of research results to the general public" and "Google Scholar, which generally has un-paywalled PDFs from academic web pages," respectively. Other people answer (3) elsewhere in this discussion, with answers like arXiv and PLoS. If your point is that it is not yet clear economically how academic publishing will work in the future, then, I agree.