Half of All Research Papers Published In 2011 Already Free To Read

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."

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[blueg3]

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.

Re:Free copies?

[blueg3]

A very large fraction of them are preprints posted by the authors. Usually legally.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[JoshuaZ]

Very little. You don't generally get paid for papers. The money from the journals in almost all fields goes to the publishers, not anyone in the field.

Re:Author's Personal Websites

[barlevg]

Journals also typically allow you to put your article on arXiv. In general, I'm pretty sure you retain the rights to your own article. As an example: the American Institute of Physics' Transfer of Copyright Agreement [pdf] [aip.org] allows the author

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.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[Tsiangkun]

we generally pay to be published in the glossy covered journals. The direction of travel for the money is from the researchers to the journals.