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Wikipedia is full of general purpose knowledge and paid for by donations. Even if you never make use of 99.99% of the knowledge it has, there is something for
by rauljara 15y ago
Wikipedia is full of general purpose knowledge and paid for by donations. Even if you never make use of 99.99% of the knowledge it has, there is something for you, and a reason for you to donate.
Academic journals are full of incredibly specific knowledge. While some of it is accessible to people with a moderate amount of intelligence/diligence, any journal whose name isn't "Science" is designed for and by an incredibly small group of individuals with an incredibly specific knowledge base. Where is the donor base for that?
Answer: Universities are the only plausible donors. And they seem to think maintaining their place of privilege in being able to access the articles is worth some extra bucks.
- lotu 15y agoWe have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these services than they would be for an academic journal hosting. If you didn't want to go the centralized method a small journal with under 1,000 readers (>10MB per month per user) could probably host buy hosting for under $100/year. Something that small would be easy to cover out of pocket or via donations
- sycren 15y agoservices like youtube and flickr have adverts corresponding to a user's tastes and the particular media. How would you suppose doing that with scientific journals?
- jcarreiro 15y ago> We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these Don't be so sure. Some experiments can produce large data sets, which ideally should be made available alongside the published paper.
- Goladus 15y agoWell, for most of the JSTOR documents that's probably not the case. But yes sharing with large academic datasets is a real and only partially solved (IOW not solved at all) problem.
- impendia 15y agoI work at a university. I don't think universities have any vested interest in maintaining their place of privilege. Certainly faculty members don't, with rare exceptions (at least one of which I know about). But I think there is not a lot of interest in changing the system. The people who could change things are not directly affected by the disadvantages of the current system.
- coliveira 15y agoThe issue is, university professors already have access to these papers. They are among the few people that want, need, and can understand the science behind it. It looks like it makes sense that universities are willing to pay for that privilege.
- pnathan 15y agoYou forgot larger industrial research lab-y companies, e.g., Google and DuPont.