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This might as well be the only social/economical problem, which manages to make me angry. Not, because of the money wasted, which was supposed to go to educatio
by ma2rten 15y ago
This might as well be the only social/economical problem, which manages to make me angry. Not, because of the money wasted, which was supposed to go to education and research. Governments have invented all kinds of worse ways to blow money. Not, because of my believe that access to science is supposed to be free and open to everyone. There are more essential things like human rights and access to clean drinking water, which should be universal, but still they are not.
What makes me angry about it, is that it is such an unnecessary problem. It is just such a bad instance of the tragedy of the commons. Everyone recognizes what a bad situation it is, but no one feels they are in the position to do something about it.
Imagine the top 100 universities in the world, or even just the Ivory League, sat together and signed an agreement, that they would prohibit their staff to publish in non-free journals and that they would stop subscribing to them. I think this problem would sort itself out instantly. Same thing if the funding agencies of the EU and US would sit together.
Anyway, it seems like finally something happening about it, which is great.
- anon_tpb 15y agoLooking backwards, rather than forwards, the people best placed to do something about what has already happened are "The Pirate Bay". Surely it couldn't be too hard to obtain copies of all the papers to date and put them online? Another option might be for researchers to post screenshots of every paper read to Freenet. Over time, the collection would build into something useful. Does software exist to strip stenography and DRM out of documents? Maybe reduce it to ASCII or TeX, then do a brand new reformat?
- slowpoke 15y agoSomething related happened a few months ago. A heap of old papers which have long since entered the public domain, but where locked behind paywalls, were leaked. There's a statement accompanying the torrent[1], speaking up against the outrage that is the academic publishing system. It's still quite well seeded, me being among the people who spare bandwidth for it. [1]: https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosop...
- brazzy 15y ago"Surely it couldn't be too hard to obtain copies of all the papers to date and put them online?" Except that would not help at all with the underlying problem. Scientists need the articles to be easily accessible, up-to-date and citable. The science publishers' monopoly is not so much on content as it is on prestige.