Last week, I tried to access a paper which I cowrote with a bunch of fine people a few years back, only to discover that I couldn’t, since Edinburgh University does not have a subscription to the publication in which it appeared. This made me seriously angry, and so I started thinking about all the things that are wrong with the current scientific publishing model. Recently I had a pub conversation about copyright and scientific publishing with José, who pointed out that the situation (at least in the mathematical physics field, but undoubtedly elsewhere as well) is absurd. At the moment the scientific publishing model consists of restricted-access journals to which the institutions of researchers must subscribe to. However, it is not clear what the journals and the publishers really contribute to the process anymore. It’s the academics who do the research, the typography (with LaTeX and other modern layout tools) and the peer reviews --for free! And, in the case that their institution does not have a subscription to the journal in which the paper appears, they have to pay to view the final version of their own paper.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/03/2005 10:19:00 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.
