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mikeph
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Just read this article which went on-line a couple of hours ago and was interested in some opinions here from the research community.
I noticed a couple of particularly well put comments:
Time for a change?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/wellcome-trust-academic-springOne of the world's largest funders of science is to throw its weight behind a growing campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared online.
Nearly 9,000 researchers have already signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing as part of a campaign dubbed the "academic spring" by supporters due to its potential for revolutionising the spread of knowledge.
But the intervention of the Wellcome Trust, the largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is likely to galvanise the movement by forcing academics it funds to publish in open online journals.
Sir Mark Walport, the director of Wellcome Trust, said that his organisation is in the final stages of launching a high calibre scientific journal called eLife that would compete directly with top-tier publications such as Nature and Science, seen by scientists as the premier locations for publishing. Unlike traditional journals, however, which cost British universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year to access, articles in eLife will be free to view on the web as soon as they are published.
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I noticed a couple of particularly well put comments:
This is excellent news. In the past, academics (like me) signed away copyright to journal publishers, who told them it had administrative advantages and who paid nothing for the rights. No one imagined the Internet thirty or forty years ago. Now all that old work, most of it publicly funded, has been re-cycled but hidden behind pay walls. The authors have never had to be consulted - they had signed away their rights at the outset. ALL this old work should be on open access, free to download
I don't see how the publishers can claim the cost of peer review and the editorial boards of journals as an expense. The editorial boards and reviewers are volunteers who give their time for free. I'm a computer scientist and regularly publish in Elsevier and Springer journals - I also review for them for free. It's crazy, we do the research, write the papers, our peers review them and then we sign away our copyright and the publishers charge our institutions to buy the journals!
I was recently offered to pay $500 to make a paper "open access" - they've got to be kidding.
Time for a change?