Created on 2017-01-31 11:29
Published on 2017-01-31 11:45
Published on January 31, 2017
At the end of last year's Q1 (2016), we got informed about a news − one among many others − which we may have overlooked for a long time, about scientific publications access.
All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging. [...] Many academics, university librarians and longtime advocates for open scholarly research are closely following Elbakyan’s efforts. They believe she is finally giving academic publishers their Napster moment, a reference to the illegal music-sharing service that disrupted and permanently altered the industry. − A young lady that is − shattering the $10 billion-per-year paywall of academic publishers.
Is Napster rightly called into this scene or are we seeing something different, in here?
Researchers sign over the copyright and provide their work, often taxpayer funded, free to publishers who then get other researchers to review the papers − also free. The publishers then sell journal subscriptions − some titles cost more than $5,000 a year − back to universities and the federal government. And if someone wants an article, that costs about $35, so that person is paying for the research and to read the results.
They are crying for thefts about those sharing the intellectual property that has been produced by other's work while such work has been payed by someone else. People are financing paying with their taxes the researchers and they are doing their job writing scientific essays. Then researchers and people are asked to pay for it, back again.
Should such a kind of thing be considered a theft? But who did it, in fact? Music and films are completely another story because they have been financed and produced by private capitals not by taxpayers. Therefore, Napster was completely another story.
“While we don’t condone fraud and using illegal sources, I will say that I appreciate how she is shining a light on just how out of whack the system is of providing easy access to basic information that our universities and scholars need to advance science and research,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, an organization that advocates for open access to research. “This has been a problem for decades.”
The intellectual property paid by taxes is a common good and should be administrate in such coherent way for the good of collectivity. When it comes with science, for the good of science itself and human kind. So, what's wrong in this young lady effort?
Thanks Alexandra to make us thinking again, helping us to think better.
SSRN − the leading social science and humanities repository and online community − joins Elsevier. Elsevier’s acquisition of the Social Science Research Network, with plans to strengthen it alongside Mendeley’s technology platform, marks a significant advancement for each community of users. [...] SSRN will continue to enable users to “submit for free and download for free.” For SSRN users, you are assured that our ethos will remain intact.
The Royal Society is a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. [...] Open Access Publishing Initiative: We have been very pleased with being able to exercise the open access option for our recent Biology Letters article. We chose the open access option in order to improve the accessibility of our article and, based on the feedback I have received, I think the article has been much more widely read than it may have been otherwise. Everything seemed quite straightforward, and we particularly appreciated the timeliness of the manuscript review and production process. − Michael W Miller, DVM, Ph.D, Colorado Wildlife Research Center, USA.
(C) 2017, Roberto A. Foglietta, licensed under Creative Common Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike v4.0 International Terms (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).