Spencer Reiss, Science Wants to Be Free, MIT Technology Review, May 2005. An interview with Mike Eisen, Berkeley biologist and co-founder of the Public Library of Science. Excerpt (quoting Eisen): 'Depending on who’s counting, 95 percent of research papers in the life sciences are still locked up by the big commercial publishers --Elsevier, Springer, and the rest. It's ludicrous at a time when the Internet has pushed the actual cost of distributing a research paper close to zero....[I]f research were freely available, people would build better tools to sift through and dig things out. And what if you're Joe Guy whos just been diagnosed with cancer? It's ridiculous that you can't read papers that your tax dollars have paid for that might be pertinent to your condition. And often your doctor can't either --we won’t even mention the doctor in Uganda. In the first issue of the Lancet --Elsevier's prime medical journal-- there was an editorial stating that the aim of the publication was to communicate the findings of science to the widest possible audience. Somewhere along the line, they became a business and lost touch with why they exist.... [Question: Why was the NIH policy weakened?] The forces of darkness surprised us....What we have now is an egregiously subsidized industry --they're given content for free and then paid tremendous amounts of money to process and distribute it. Peer reviewers mostly aren't compensated. In a lot of fields, even the people who oversee the peer-review process are volunteers. And of course, the research that went into the papers is already paid for. And then the publishers have the gall to insist that they own a copyright on the results.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/16/2005 09:24:00 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.
