Slashdot Mirror
Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results
Tim O'Reilly has a post about how the prominent scholarly journal Nature has recently launched an open-access service for pre-publication research and presentations. In Nature Precedings, all content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and can be commented and voted on. The service will cover research in biology, chemistry, and earth science, much like arXiv.org does for physics, mathematics, and computer science.
You're correct, but most of us don't care. Until the journals write my papers for me, the public's right to access that information and my own right to dictate what to do with my content, as the author, trumps the journals' right to restrict access in the name of profit. When we receive neither compensation for nor rights to our own work, the intellectual property system is broken.
As scientists, it is our mission to advance our fields. A necessary precondition to this is enabling access to our work for the widest audience possible, so other scientists may build upon or refine our methods. I would argue that any "scientist" holding back results in the name of personal gain is not a scientist at all.