Half of All Research Papers Published In 2011 Already Free To Read 82
ananyo writes "Search the Internet for any research article published in 2011, and you have a 50-50 chance of downloading it for free. This claim — made in a report produced for the European Commission — suggests that many more research papers are openly available online than was previously thought. Previous best estimates for the proportion of papers free online run at around 30%. Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says the report confirms his optimism. 'When researchers hit a paywall online, they turn to Google to search for free copies — and, increasingly, they are finding them,' he says."
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1. Term limits, including for justices.
I'm a big fan of the idea of 18 year terms for SCOTUS justices, to give the benefits of lifetime appointment without the stupid "I'll retire when my team has the presidency" BS.
2. Repealing Amendment 17 and returning the election of senators to state legislatures
We changed that for a reason. Changing it back might give is a couple of years while the lobbyists set up shop in the state houses, but ultimately I think that will lead to more state-level corruption.
3. A congressional supermajority to override Supreme Court decisions (overruling what could be a stacked court)
The congress can impeach - that's enough.
4. Spending limit based on GDP
Yup. It'll never happen until the "we can print infinite money" bubble bursts, but
Re:Author's Personal Websites (Score:5, Informative)
to give permission to third parties to republish print versions of the Article or a translation thereof, or excerpts therefrom, without obtaining permission from AIP Publishing LLC, provided the Publisher-prepared version is not used for this purpose, the Article is not published in another conference proceedings or journal, and the third party does not charge a fee.
In other words, as long as you're not using the corrections you get back from AIP's peer review process, you can put your article anywhere that doesn't charge a fee and isn't a journal. The agreement goes on to EXPLICITLY grant you the right to the journal-edited version on your own personal webpage or on arXiv.
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This is rather the norm in many journals (even those of the much-hated Elsevier). You don't even have to leave the peer review corrections out! "Publisher-prepared version" means the formatted version with all the graphs, logos, layout etc. that will be found verbatim in the published version. The text of the "preprint" is still owned by the author.
What about all the non-researchers? (Score:4, Interesting)
If I was a real researcher with a real budget, I would be happy to fork over a couple bucks to read an
article I needed to reference in my research but I would guess that there are alot more non-researchers
like typical slashdot reader than actual real researchers. I also turn to google when I hit a paywall
because it's usually more of a passing interest and I'm not going to pay $5 to $35 to read an article
that I might only understand half of anyways but it would sure be nice if there was a way to give
access to the non-professional general public as a way to pass on useful knowledge instead of hiding
it behind a paywall where only a select few people in the same field are willing to pay for it.
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As a side note, I wonder how much of the money exchanging hands in these paywalls is just
going back and forth between different people in the same field. By eliminating paywalls, the
information is available to more people and researchers can stop trading money to read each
other's papers.
Re:What about all the non-researchers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about all the non-researchers? (Score:4, Informative)
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That's not fair, that's a post hoc justification for it. The research is what's supposed to get you the job, not the journal that your publishing in. If a college is interested in hiring you, they're going to review the articles anyways. Failing to do so is just plain negligent.
Sure, it might be a useful filter, but it's not the journal that dictates the quality of the research, it's the research. Institutions that just look at that are liable to wind up hiring up a frauds before too long as the people caug
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Generally? How about ever.
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publishers, who do not produce anything.
The publishers provide a useful service, which is surprisingly not obvious to most people who deal with them. It is much more obvious to those that have worked on the other side and tried organizing things like journals and proceedings. The fact that they way overcharge for what they provide is a big problem though, but claiming they offer nothing isn't going to help fix problems. Acknowledging what they do in terms of organizing, quality control (even if inadequate at times), and distributing is kind of
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I was doing some reasearch at work into computer vision systems. I could have asked for them to allocate a certain budget for buying the papers, but that would involved going through several laers of bureaucracy to authorise this. It was easier to seach for the authors.
There's also the fact that it's not always possible to tell whether this is going to be useful from the abstract, and most people have an aversion to wasting money.
Re:What about all the non-researchers? (Score:4, Informative)
Academic researchers rarely pay for articles (in my experience). However, their institutions often have access through subscriptions purchased by the library.
They also frequently use Google Scholar to find free copies of paywalled articles that the don't have access to. It's a great approach. Another solution is to find the contact e-mail of the lead author and politely ask him for a preprint copy.
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Re:What about all the non-researchers? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I was a real researcher with a real budget, I would be happy to fork over a couple bucks to read an article
No, you wouldn't. You see, 80% of everything is crap. Actually it's more like 99%.
Given the wildly misleading titles and abstract, sometimes because they are just bizarrely off the wall, sometimes because thy overinterpret the results and sometimes because they are just optimistic or badly written, most papers you can dismiss before you read the whole thing.
Of the ones that remain and are actually genuinely relevant, 80% are crap.
Sure $2 for a useful paper wouldn't be too bad, but you have to read beyond the abstract in perhaps 10 or 20 papers. The cost rapidly mounts up. And the faff and annoyance.
You'd start to get really pissed off really fast if you kept spending $2 on utter wastes of time.
Actually, very many researchers want their work to be freely avaliable, and almost all of them stick the work somewhere it can be freely downloaded, such as on their website. If you don't, then you lose citations and that is important.
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All because researchers prefer to focus on their research rather than shaking of
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All good points, but:
All because researchers prefer to focus on their research rather than shaking off parasites.
Research is not an easy career. I tried it and it is amazingly stressful to try to build a career. You have to really care about it and to get a permenant job you have to work really, really, really long hours for very long periods.
The only reason you do this is because you are so fundementally interested in the work that it seems worthwhile and you are driven to keep pushing.
Not only that but if
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Most laboratories have yearly subscriptions that give them access to all relevant publications.
I've never seen a researcher fork over some of his own personal money to acquire a paper.
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You are right that those in the academic world generally have access via an institutional subscription.
However, the rest of the world doesn't generally have access.
It's not a good thing to exclude so many potential users and contributors of knowledge especially when you consider that academic worlds tend to be closed in a kind of "group think" and that real innovation tends to come from people who "think different".
As a physician without a current institutional sponsor, I am confronted with this problem dai
Email the author(s) (Score:3)
If Google with the title of the paper and filetype:pdf fails just email one of the authors. So far I have been able to get papers that way.
For example I am interested in scorpions and am in contact with several professionals who answered in the beginning my questions and helped me to ID species I encountered. Now, years later, I have found a few new species and we've been on field trips to collect those. But before that I was already on a mailing list to which new papers where mailed on a regular basis befo
Free copies? (Score:2)
Now how many of the "free" copies crawled by Google are actually free, and how many are just "pirated", e.g. posted by an instructor as reading material for a class, without permission from publishers?
Will this finding lead to some DMCA takedown notices?
Re:Free copies? (Score:5, Informative)
A very large fraction of them are preprints posted by the authors. Usually legally.
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Most of it is true. Thought I must say that I never really understood all the legalese associated with paper publications. Most of the time, I am not sure whether it is ok to post a preprint or not. What I usually do is post a technical report on arxiv before I submit a journal paper.
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It is legal for the author to post his article on his website as long as it does not include the publisher's editing.
It is considered a working copy, a draft or a preprint.
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Also ironically, this study presumes (and confirms the opposite, IMHO) that research papers are a commodity that can be compared quantitatively and not qualitatively, which isn't true. Not all papers are created equal--have equal peer review, editing, data pools, important(expensive) topics..
Already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that in the EU a nontrivial amount of research grants are paid by taxpayer money, I'd say "already" is not the term I was thinking of. "only" would be more the qualifier that qualifies.
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How about you and your mods RTFA?
"The first report measures the availability of scholarly publications in 22 fields of knowledge across the European Research Area, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and the United States, between 2004 and 2011."
Just because the survey was done by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation does not mean they considered only EU-funded research. And yes, there is a large push for open access for EU-funded research, but they have not made it a requireme
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If it's not a requirement yet, than "already" is even more off than I thought. In other words, if it's not ALREADY a requirement to tell ME the results of what MY money funded, something is really wrong here.
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Wrong (Score:2)
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Which half? (Score:3, Insightful)
Half of all research papers are not worth the paper they will never be printed on.
How many peer-reviewed papers are free to read?
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My thoughts exactly. Or not even that - how about the papers you want to read? It doesn't matter if 99% of the papers are available for free if the one you want is paywalled only!
And it assumes that it's an even distribution - that in all fields, a paper you want has a 50% chance of being free (or you can find an equivalent for free). Depending on the field and the article, this a
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wee! piracy rules! (Score:2)
(*) the pirates who distribute them are often the original authors (**)
(**) the original authors are not the copyright holders.
Short term versus long term (Score:1)
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For how long? (Score:2)
There are journals that let you see their current articles for free, and then lock them up after 6 mos or a year. Even at my school there are online subscriptions which only let us see things back to like 1996, then if we want to see past that we have to pay (or the university could pay for a more deluxe subscription).
In any case, there needs to be a concerted effort to download all this stuff and torrent it or something.
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In any case, there needs to be a concerted effort to download all this stuff and torrent it or something.
There are such efforts underway. Some sites have more useful collections of scientific articles than my own university's library.
ACM rights assignment (Score:1)