Greed Is a Paywall Blocking Human Knowledge

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Greed Is a Paywall Blocking Human Knowledge

Posted on Dec 17, 2014
By Thor Benson


One of the most widely read academic journals, Nature, just became accessible without a paid subscription. Macmillan, its publisher, announced Dec. 2 that it would be making 49 of its journals, including Nature, available to read on the PDF viewing service ReadCube. That said, readers cannot simply go to ReadCube and view any journal they want; they have to get a link to the journal from an existing subscriber in order to read it for free.

This method is a way of imitating open access without actually instating it. Although being able to link directly to scientific documents in an online article is useful for letting a reader see the exact source of what the article is reporting, relying on direct links leaves behind the academics and the researchers who want to search for specific journals and may not have a subscription. Those without a subscription will be relegated to “beggar access,” as Scientific American put it, where they can read something only if they ask subscribers to share it with them.

The issue with hiding academic articles behind paywalls is that the research featured in these kinds of journals is often paid for with government grants or through public university funding. To ask the public to pay for a subscription is thus a kind of double tax, in that would-be readers pay taxes that fund the studies that provide the basis for the journal articles and then pay again to read the finished product. The authors of the research do not receive a payment from the journals when the article is accepted or when it is published, and the money from subscribers instead goes directly to the publisher.

“The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations,” the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz wrote in 2008 in the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. He fought against the privatization of knowledge, becoming a warrior for the open access movement. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/greed_is_a_paywall_blocking_human_knowledge_20141217

[SamKnause]

1. Thanks for posting.

[xchrom]

2. du rec.

[bemildred]

3. DU Rec. Greed is the paywall that blocks lots of things. nt