Rick Weiss, A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research, Washington Post, August 5, 2003. A good profile of the Public Library of Science. Excerpt: "Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?...It remains to be seen whether the newly bubbling discontent among citizens and politicians will boil over into a full-blown coup, fulfilling scientists' longstanding goal of democratizing the scientific publication enterprise. But whether it succeeds or fails, historians of science say, the effort is a remarkable social experiment in itself....For scientists, the benefits would extend well beyond being able to read scientific papers for free. Unlike their ink-on-paper counterparts, scientific papers that are maintained in open electronic databases can have their data tables downloaded, massaged and interlinked with databases from other papers, allowing scientists to compare and build more easily on one another's findings." (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/05/2003 11:23:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
