Slashdot Mirror
Black Market Database Access To Scholarly Journals
An anonymous reader writes "University libraries offer access to a vast array of valuable materials — if you have a login and password. Now people are buying and selling university credentials online, or giving them away on warez sites. They're used by upstart companies abroad who need access to the latest industrial compounds or other valuable info on databases like SciFinder."
Taxpayer funded research should not be behind pay walls or restricted in any other manner. Exception for information with military applications...mostly.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Science should be about free access to other people's discoveries, so that our education and science can use these discoveries. Stuff that is published beyond a paywall is't very useful.
Sometimes people who publish stuff that is available in pay-to-read databases also put their articles and findings on their own site accessible for free.
The only people with the right to keep scientific knowledge closed-source are those raised by wolves without so much as even a hint of the nature of linguistics and any thought upon how IT might have evolved. As Newton said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - it applies no less to someone so nameless their only affiliation with science is the selling of other people's methods.
This has been going on for quite a while, actually. If you're established in the industry you can just hire a professor or grad student and then compel them to use their access..if you aren't established in the industry what do you do?
They haven't provided a decent way to look through scholarly journals that doesn't involve paying off someone at school.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Is Warez doing this as some sort of program to educate people so they can enter the US or what? Seems odd to me.
These publishers have been nothing but parasites profiting from publically funded research, selling individual articles for $40 a pop (often being no more then 5 page PDF files!), can't say they didn't deserve this, they probably deserve worse.
It doesn't surprise me at all that there's a huge amount of copyright violation. Here is the paywall page for a classic physics paper describing an experiment that tested a prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity. The paper was published in 1960. They're willing to sell me the scans of this 5-page paper for $25. I teach physics at a community college, so I don't have free access to this journal online. If the price was something more reasonable, like $1 or maybe even $5, I might have considered paying. But at $25 it's not even an option. I can drive to the local Cal State campus, pull the journal off the shelf, and photocopy this paper for 50 cents. No, that's not copyright violation, because it falls under fair use.
What's really ironic is that new physics papers are essentially all available for free, whereas old ones aren't. Today, almost everyone in the field posts their papers on arxiv.org, where anyone who wants to read them can download them for free.
Find free books.
They're risking sanction by their university for abuse of systems.
It's absurd that research is funded by the tax payer, but when it's submitted to a journal, they want to claim the copyright - even the original author of the work doesn't have the right to re-publish it.
In return for this, what does the journal do? Well, they have the submission checked out by a team of reviewers. Except none of these are payed for their services (which is probably as it should be, otherwise that could introduce bias). But the journal's not out of pocket there. Again, it's likely the tax-payer footing the bill.
The other thing the journal does is actually publish the final, peer-reviewed articles. Except, these days, no-one in their right mind would bother with dead trees. It's a massive waste, both to produce and distribute, and much slower and less convenient for all concerned. So they just stick the papers on a website.
I'm sure that any academic institution would be willing to host the papers for free.
I'm all for anything that breaks the stranglehold these parasites have over the world of academia. Divulging login details isn't piracy, it's reclaiming rights that should never have been surrendered in the first place.
I traveled aboard to the UK and the Continent when I was 21. There were many upstart companies there.
And piss-poor journalism, also. Subtitle "...while safeguards can be a hassle for users, librarians say the effort is worth it..." - name a single, identifiable librarian who gives a pinch of shit if the paid-journal asshats get their pound of flesh every time someone reads an article. The journal publishers can all go fuck themselves. Knowledge is to be shared, and nobody else gives a damn if these assholes make money off of it.
I can drive to the local Cal State campus, pull the journal off the shelf, and photocopy this paper for 50 cents.
They're selling convenience. How much does the gas cost? And how much at your hourly rate does your time cost?
Taxpayer funded research should not be behind pay walls or restricted in any other manner
The largest funding source for biomedical research in the US is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They recently passed a rule requiring NIH-funded work to be published in an accessible manner. This has had some interesting results, as now journals such as Nature and Science have ways to release articles to the public so that they can be in their high-impact journals and accessible freely.
Of course, this only applies to grants that are approved 2010 and onwards; work funded by older grants does not need to worry about this. However, grants that are were issued originally prior to 2010, and are being renewed, do.
In other words, less federally funded work is published behind paywalls now than ever before.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Doesn't most cheap companies already hire them for just for this reason? Access to all the journals for free.
For years now, I've been meaning to view those video lectures of Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science from CMU. But all I get is a wall asking for my WedISO login. Btw if u have it, post it here! :)
I run a small webserver inside an .edu domain -- looking at my error logs I see daily attempts from Chinese IP addresses to connect to Science Direct and other subscription-only services, presumably looking for open proxies or connections to subscription only services accessible from users within my machine's IP block -- and this presumably explains why.
ripping off the digital copy that some company has made available online at its own expense?
Expenses that are paid for by universities without regard to who access the paper. These companies are not suffering because someone accesses these papers; their income is as close to guaranteed as is conceivable.
don't be surprised if the online publishers close up shop
When they have such a cozy arrangement with researchers, why would they close up shop? These journals are not paying for the papers they host, they are not paying the reviewers (in many cases the reviewers are volunteers) and they are getting enormous amounts of money from the subscription fees that research institutions pay. There would be no reason for the publishers to close shop, when they are not losing money.
awesome locations where you can get the information more or less for free
You mean a "university." Or perhaps the library system of a major city. Or even a community college, as many community colleges do pay for subscriptions to prominent journals. These publishers get money from a lot of places, and the revenue stream is not going to go away until someone establishes a better system for making articles available to the world.
Palm trees and 8
My local community college has some access to scholarly journals. My vo-tech high school had a limited selection as well. One thing I can say for sure is the selection and the search mechanic were pure shit. A broad search returned full articles that weren't even remotely relevant. A search that was even slightly refined would only turn up abstracts and citations. My school boasted having access to EBSCOhost(apparently the Google of scholarly journals) but I found it to be the least helpful of our resources.
Maybe tuition at some fancy 4 year schools pays for more journals, but the selection at my local community college wasnt great.
What if the student enrolled for the sole purpose of selling his access to the highest bidder?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, because you don't feel like heading to the library to make that photocopy, you think you'd be justified in ripping off the digital copy that some company has made available online at its own expense?
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
I feel justified in accessing, by any means authorized or not, content that MY GODDAMNED TAX DOLLARS already paid for.
If Elsevier et al don't like those terms, they have every right to see how long they last without any content derived from public funding.
I work for one of those educational / journal publishers and I can confirm that they are antediluvian leeches that contribute absolutely nothing to the sum of human knowledge and they simply want you to pay for content again and again and again and are NO different than the record companies we've, um, smashed. Seriously, they help inflate the cost of education with their insane pricing models and generally crap technology. I say put them all out of business and let each university manage their publications for the general good.
Virtually all the academic publishers using paywalls for journal articles are parasites. We should deprive them of income at every opportunity. I'd therefore happily use my numerous old academic VPN accounts to access "parasite" journals for my own work or a cube mate's work. There are of course legit journals that're wholly owned by academic societies or university departments for whome I'd make my employer pay for access. And I'd never endanger the security at academic institutions by sharing my credentials, or waste my time downloading stuff for strangers.
I'm pretty sure you have a misunderstanding of fair-use there. Care to cite the copyright code that allowed you to do that?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I have a chronic illness and subscribe to a listserv to keep up with the latest research findings. However the majority of the time people just post a paper's abstract and then it's anybody's guess whether the fulltext will be available online, behind a paywall, etc. It's a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved.
Also (and fairly off topic), since other commentators have brought up the subject of the internet making physical copies of journals almost obsolete, it also doesn't seem to have sunk in to those in charge that with the internet there is now absolutely no reason not to require authors to publish the full data set behind research papers, which would significantly aid in the scientific process since anyone who wanted to would be able to double-check the data and see if the authors' conclusions were adequate, etc.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
17 U.S.C. 107
If everyone would just publish their papers on their web sites, as most computer scientists do (e.g., using bibbase.org), then this wouldn't be necessary. Of course, journals need to secure their funding, but I believe that with the web and the new open (peer) reviewing approaches, we don't really need journals all that badly anymore. Also, in computer science, e.g., it seems that there are now conferences that have higher standards of acceptance than the top journals in the respective fields. That is not to suggest to remove the concept of longer, more thoroughly reviewed articles though. They are important too, but could be reviewed and published in different ways (web). Print is so 19th century :-)
Yeah, exactly, for example:
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Clearly indicates that a full copy is not going to qualify, and every element must be met for fair use.
"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include"
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You're lucky there's no -1 'wrong' mod or I would have slapped you with it.
Wiki:
Fair use, a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work, is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.
Emphasis mine.
No, I'm not going to find the precise piece of legislation for you. If you want to be that pedantic then do it yourself (I'll give you a hint: you can probably find it in Wiki's sources). That's like if someone said "murder is illegal" and you were like, "Oh yeah, what precise piece of legislation says that?"
Yes, teachers can make copies of copyrighted material and use it in the classroom.
I have looked it up, and the 'limited' use is precisely what he runs afoul of by making a complete copy.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
BTW, if interested, look at the other mistaken AC's post in response to mine and you can read the actual law that supports my position.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I can drive to the local Cal State campus, pull the journal off the shelf, and photocopy this paper for 50 cents.
How much does gas cost where you live?!
That's not the way it works. Fair use allows the use of all portions necessary to carry out the use. A full copy can be used if it is _legitimately_ used for educational use. The four factors listed are just that factors. In the law, the term "factors" has a very specific meaning and that is that they are things to consider whether or not a certain test is met (unlike elements which all have to be met). This means that if three factors point one way and the three the other the answer can still go both ways, depending on their weight. The court is required to examine and give their determination as to which way the factors go towards fair use, but given the nature of the paper it could very well be that the whole paper is required in order to properly teach it or provide context or the like. Therefore, depending on how it is actually used reproduction of the whole does not automatically result in a finding that the use was not fair.
Clearly indicates that a full copy is not going to qualify, and every element must be met for fair use.
No, that's incorrect. The code does not say that all four factors must be met, and that isn't how the courts have interpreted it. The WP article specifically addresses your misconception: "Common misunderstandings: [...] If you're copying an entire work, it's not fair use. While copying an entire work may make it harder to justify the amount and substantiality test, it does not make it impossible that a use is fair use. For instance, in the Betamax case, it was ruled that copying a complete television show for time-shifting purposes is fair use."
Find free books.
Really, the only problem with journals now is regarding older material. The NIH is the largest government funding source for biomedical research in this country, and they set a requirement for results to be in open-access or accessible formats for NIH-funded work. This means that new work funded by NIH grants, even if it is published in Nature or other notoriously expensive journals, will have its published results available free of charge.
Of course, academics are aware of the problems getting to other expensive journals and their archives. If you can find someone on the inside sympathetic to your cause, you can probably work something out. I won't name names, but I was able to talk a friend of mine at a large university to let me set up an old Linux system in his lab, that automatically sets up an X-forwarding reverse SSH connection to my own system at home. The result of that of course is I can run an X application on that system - which is inside their network - anytime I want access to journals that they subscribe to.
Certainly other people could make similar arrangements through friends, friends-of-friends, or similar.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
...for the public. In most public libraries that I've been to (which, granted, aren't that many but there have been a few), library assistants can help you log in to various academic research journal databases for doing research.
At one point about 4 years ago, I called my local library in El Paso, TX (where I lived at the time) and asked them some questions about this. The library assistant was more than eager to help, and he *gave me the username and password for the State of Texas' library system to login to research databases, such as EBSCO, etc. OVER THE PHONE.*
I started accessing stuff from home immediately : ) Unfortunately I've since lost the account credentials, but this approach, without any social engineering at all, worked out well for me (unexpectedly well!).
Of course I can't speak for all states in the US, but you can of course give it a try! YMMV, but it worked for me once!
US Code 17 U.S.C. Â 107. Specifically, exceptions to copyright are allowed when the copying is for "teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." Assuming the OP is doing it for one of those purposes (and he is faculty at a community college), he falls within fair use.
I have. The law does not support your position. It says the amount of copied material is a consideration in finding whether or not it is fair use; it does not say it determines whether it is fair use. The law, for those of you who do want to read it: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
Sorry, no. Following that logic, I could just photocopy a 300 page college textbook and hand it out to everyone in every college class taking that subject, because it is legitimately used for education use.
No, you can't do that, because it's not fair use,and it's not legal.
Clearly indicates that a full copy is not going to qualify, and every element must be met for fair use.
Wrong. Fair use is a minefield.
see "Fairest of them all and other fairy tales of fair use"
A moot point, perhaps, but tax funded research in other often developing nations needs to be published in the same journals. When a handful of pdf files costs more than a student's work for a month, something is very wrong. This is not theft of US based IP, but instead the limiting of free exchange of ideas, knowledge and understanding between the world's academics. The US may do much of the world's science, but every country tries to do great science and this can only be measured through scientific impact in peer reviewed journals?
Virtually all NASA contracts now require open distribution of raw data and published results. There might be a 3-6 month lag from time raw data is received on ground to time it shows up in public accessible database/archiving center (DAAC in NASA speak), but once the pipeline is established, the time lag is expected to be reduced. Now.. openly accessible does not mean "easy for casual users to browse".. but at least it's in standard documented formats and accessible via web/internet standard mechanisms.
Hello. Your question is indeed important. Certainly, individual servers will not last more than a few years. But once information is truly authorized to be free, it will be mirrored worldwide forever.
Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive fame has indeed worked upon addressing your concern. His solution is a multi tiered approach. Adapted here, it becomes: First, volatile copies would be available from local nodes such as p2p & torrents. Second level medium copies are available from volunteer archives whose function is to coral cache / distribute loads for spot questions and curious onlookers.
Then the higher level copies are the universities themselves, whose servers are more focused on heavy users. At the final level a few people do extinction checks and if too many sources go down they would repopulate the web with the text again down the layers.
Copyright Video 1
> If Elsevier et al don't like those terms, they have every right to see how long they last without any content derived from public funding.
Frankly, I'd be satisfied if Google would just fucking give us an option to completely exclude search results behind paywalls. Yes, I know you can sometimes avoid them by just ignoring anything that doesn't have a link to view from Google's cache (big tip-off), but it's still annoying how they've increasingly littered their search results with that crap.
Or, as MrSafety sang (in a slightly different context, slightly paraphrased)... "I will not will not pay... I will not will not pay... the stuff's o-kay-ayy, but I still will not pay..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhhiO8ZIols
I'm pretty sure you have a misunderstanding of fair-use there. Care to cite the copyright code that allowed you to do that?
Um...photocopying copyrighted works for educational purposes is allowed under US copyright law.
I don't think the GP comment was saying it was fair use, just that it could be. It was simply countering the statement that copying the whole thing would _automatically_ render the use unfair. see also time shifting and Betamax.
are full of crap anyway. Especially IEEE that has full of SCIgen-created papers.
New Economic Perspectives
"I can drive to the local Cal State campus, pull the journal off the shelf, and photocopy this paper for 50 cents. "
You can bring a digital camera and copy it for free.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What's really ironic is that new physics papers are essentially all available for free, whereas old ones aren't. Today, almost everyone in the field posts their papers on arxiv.org, where anyone who wants to read them can download them for free.
Yes and no. Researchers are all too often playing into the hands of the current publishing status quo. There are quite some people aiming for high-profile publications (at least in my field, quantum physics, that is) that do not publish their best works in open access journals (or the arXiv), since the terms of the journals people like to publish in can be restrictive in that matter (or they just don't care for this possibility very much). That's the irony IMO -- people agree that for the sake of science and knowledge open access is much more beneficial than traditional publishing, whereas still scientists support the old scheme for the sake of having their name on publications on highly ranked journal papers. (Which, from a purely egoistic point of view, I can understand, by the way.)
It's worth noting that the article is mainly about access to SciFinder, a journal article database, not journal access itself. While it's reasonable to argue that publicly funded research should be free to access, a database compiled by a private company isn't the same thing.
This was inevitable, its the same effect as the recording company dinosaurs are finding.
The price of academic resource works has been a disgrace for decades.
That is only one of the factors, and not sufficient, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Co._v._King
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Nope. Even less precise copying for purely educational purposes has been found in violation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Co._v._King
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
For all those claiming I'm wrong, please read this first:
"reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson;"
Not a whole work. A small part. Who says this?
The copyright office.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
Enjoy the part that says:
"reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson."
Not the whole of a work. A small part.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And only small portions, btw, not the whole thing, which was my claim in the first place, see:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
"reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson;"
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I may have to use an account like this or else leave academia altogether.
I am currently facing the prospect of being between jobs in academia, and while I am, I will no longer have university library access to digital archives. What this means is that I cannot read the many millions of papers being hoarded by academic publishers without paying around $30~$50 for each one.
Effectively, without a recognised position at a university with good library access, or a substantial lottery win, I will not be able to research in any real sense, with all reasearch, even that which was publicly funded and published before World War 2 began. So much for access in the digital age.
I would personally have no problem whatsoever in availing of one of these services if the price was right. Since the prevailing copyright regime directly impedes my ability to do my job professionally, I see no reason to support or abide by it in any way.
I have work to do, and if turning to warez sites can help me do my job better, then I will turn to those sites without hesitation. I don't see why any professional should think otherwise.
May the Maths Be with you!
What you're citing is a quote from "The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law." The current copyright law was enacted in 1976. The 1961 report was written by the copyright office as part of a recommendation to Congress on how to revise copyright law. The report does not reflect current law and wasn't a conclusive statement of then-existing law.
As countless others have said in this thread, fair use is a minefield and its not possible for anyone other than a court to authoritatively state "this is fair use" and "this is not fair use." The law on fair use is extremely flexible and depends on the context of the use. Copying a CD to one's harddrive for personal use is generally considered fair use. Copying a CD to a friend's harddrive for their personal use is generally not considered fair use. A prof copying an academic article for his or her academic research is generally considered fair use; copying the article and handing it out to students for classroom use is generally considered fair use. A business that copies articles for students for classroom use is generally not considered classroom use.
Read it. You're still wrong. How about you read the other posts that have explained why you're wrong?
I see you your 1914 district court opinion and raise you one 1994 Supreme Court opinion, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 US 569, 577 (1994)
The fair use doctrine thus "permits [and requires] courts to avoid rigid application of the copyright statute when, on occasion, it would stifle the very creativity which that law is designed to foster."
The task is not to be simplified with bright-line rules, for the statute, like the doctrine it recognizes, calls for case-by-case analysis. The text employs the terms "including" and "such as" in the preamble paragraph to indicate the "illustrative and not limitative" function of the examples given, which thus provide only general guidance about the sorts of copying that courts and Congress most commonly had found to be fair uses. Nor may the four statutory factors be treated in isolation, one from another. All are to be explored, and the results weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright.
(citations omitted) (emphasis added).
Login: rms
Password: rms
Really, most University library resources shouldn't have password protection as getting a credential at most University libraries requires practically no validation or identification. The problem however is when employees, students and others that are using other University resources share their credentials they may be getting more access due to lack of access control than the University or the donator is aware of.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
In Soviet Russia black market sell YOU to scholarly journal!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
APS Journals (1893-Present) are available free of charge for public libraries.
http://publish.aps.org/public-access-announcement
I always thought it was bullshit that a person should be expected to shell out any cash whatsoever just to read a scholarly work or an industry standard.
Yeah, that backs up what I said actually.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I read them, they're clearly wrong. Sorry that I take the US copyright office over random incorrect slashdotters.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
FL-102, Reviewed November 2009
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This monopoly could easily be broken a small amount of quite easy civil disobedience on the part of academics.
Many academics (at least in my field, math) already archive all their own preprints on their website. Various university have similar institution-wide schemes. This is because they are coming to understand that it's more important for the university that other people read the research (more readers makes the research and the researchers more prestigious) than it is to police Elsevier's money faucet for them.
The major problem at the moment (again, I only have experience of math) is the huge mounds of research done in the 20th century roughly. Most math done before then is available freely, if not in the original than in good expositions on the web. Much of what's done in the last decade or so is on the Web. However, by far the overwhelming majority of the math out there is young enough to be in copyright and old enough not to be on the (open) web.
Academics who have access to research behind paywalls should show solidarity with independent researchers, those in poorer countries/institutions etc. One way is to put on your website a few papers that you think are important in your field and that aren't freely available. Make sure Google can find them. When you get complaints, take them down (and them put up other ones a few weeks later). Most of the academic publishers rely on the goodwill of the scientific community and will be leery of hitting bona fide researchers with lawsuits. Of course the volume of published work is such that only a tiny minority of stuff will get up there. However if everyone chooses the most important papers to them, the things of most use to the largest amount of people will be available. Once something's been fairly freely shared on the Net, it tends to stay findable pretty much forever.
There are other ways such as semi-formal email networks of people who will send you a paper from behind a paywall, or torrent projects like http://thepiratebay.org/tag/myriad. What I mentioned above is the easiest way if you're someone who wants to redress an unfairness, but don't want to spend your precious research time being a |337 w4r32 d00d.
Expenses that are paid for by universities without regard to who access the paper. These companies are not suffering because someone accesses these papers; their income is as close to guaranteed as is conceivable.
Citation needed; are you saying that all costs associated with the product, including not just the research, authoring, editing/cite/fact-checking/vetting process, publication, but also scanning/OCRing the work, paying for hosting to make it available online, paying for indexing systems, etc., are ALL on the public dime? Highly doubt that, sir.
don't be surprised if the online publishers close up shop
When they have such a cozy arrangement with researchers, why would they close up shop? These journals are not paying for the papers they host, they are not paying the reviewers (in many cases the reviewers are volunteers) and they are getting enormous amounts of money from the subscription fees that research institutions pay. There would be no reason for the publishers to close shop, when they are not losing money.
If nobody paid the access fees, they wouldn't be making any money; their costs would not be zero; and therefore they would be losing money.
You mean a "university." Or perhaps the library system of a major city. Or even a community college, as many community colleges do pay for subscriptions to prominent journals. These publishers get money from a lot of places, and the revenue stream is not going to go away until someone establishes a better system for making articles available to the world.
Yep! If you're legally allowed to just freely photocopy the stuff at a university or public library, but aren't legally allowed to freely download digital copies that some publisher has made available, again, at its own expense, then your legally acceptable solution is to go to the fucking library and quit whinging about things not being delivered to your personal computer for free.
-Legal Troll (censored and unable to post due to unpopularity of viewpoint)
As an academic, I've always thought that it is completely immoral the way that the journals lock up one's work - though unfortunately they still have a significant monopoly because of the requirement to publish in a peer reviewed journal in order to get funding.
The current process is dreadful for 'official' academics (we have this wonderful tool called google, which is completely blinded to most of the science we might want to read, and even if we can search the abstract (not the full-text), we rarely get something so simple as a link to click and read.) It's ridiculously expensive for University libraries too. Even with unlimited official access, what I might be able to achieve in an hour on google will take a day. As for embedded hyperlinks, or the ability to comment on papers (blog style), forget it.
Worse than that, teachers, students, amateur scientists, and the entire third world are completely locked out.
For what it's worth, I always add something CC-license-like to all my papers, allowing complete reproduction provided attribution is given.
companies like elsevier continue to make billions from selling this information back to the governments and institutions that (in some cases) initially funded the work. they don't seem to be suffering, do they?
in 2010, the had GBP6 Billion in revenue. yes, with a B.
defensively, they're creating "The Article of the Future" intended to add interactivity and richer features to each article. i suspect drm will come with it, and is likely the primary driver for TAotF.
Citation needed; are you saying that all costs associated with the product, including not just the research,
Journals do not pay for research.
authoring,
Journals do not pay the authors of the papers they print.
editing/cite/fact-checking/vetting process,
The reviewers are almost always volunteers.
publication,
Almost all printed copies of journals are send to libraries that have the ability to print and bind an electronic copy of the journal, if need be. The only reason libraries don't is that the publishers hold the copyrights to the papers in the journal.
but also scanning/OCRing the work,
I don't know of many researchers who send printed copies of their work to journals. Everyone I know submits their papers electronically, sometimes sending TeX/LaTeX source. Additionally, when papers are accepted, researchers are often asked to do part of the work of formatting the paper for print, preparing a "camera ready" copy of the paper.
paying for hosting to make it available online,
There, finally something useful that journals do. Useful, but redundant -- this is not something we need the publishers to do, because major universities have all the computing power and bandwidth needed to do this.
paying for indexing systems, etc., are ALL on the public dime? Highly doubt that, sir.
Probably because you have no idea how research is published. Publishing companies don't have anything close to the kind of expenses you seem to think they have. Even running the servers on which electronic copies of papers reside, the one useful thing journals do, is not as expensive as you might think; an individual Slashdot story will be probably be viewed more times than a typical research paper (with the exception of revolutionary work, which is not very common).
If nobody paid the access fees, they wouldn't be making any money; their costs would not be zero; and therefore they would be losing money.
Except that universities and large companies pay for subscriptions to journals, and they pay a lot. Consider the following, from the University of Maryland:
http://www.lib.umd.edu/CLMD/Faculty/provost.html
$1 million per year, and $100 thousand on top of that, paid to Elsevier for journal subscriptions. That is regardless of whether or not anyone was actually reading the journals. This is not some kind of exceptional case; these sorts of fees are common for libraries.
The real question is, what exactly are universities paying for? Hosting an electronic archive, and maintaining a microfilm archive as a backup, is something that major universities are already equipped to do. For $1 million per year, a university could host an electronic archive for all research in an entire field; most of the cost of such an electronic archive is in storage (again, a single article is accessed fairly infrequently). If the top universities were working together on this, not only could electronic access be maintained without requiring the publishers, but they could cover the cost of microfilm backups, ensuring access far into the future.
Palm trees and 8
It is true that a lot of the research in question was funded, at least in part, buy taxpayer money. My argument is that the academic databases, journals ect. are incurring real costs to disseminate this information. Whether it be IT or research or whatever, making this info availible online, costs real money. Since the companies are not funded by the government they need to take in some sort of revenue from some other means. If all of this was free then it would not be able to be put on the internet and you would have to go your local university to research.
I am wondering if its really "science" if its not easily findable and available. If its in a rare journal in a generally closed library, few can read it and build on it or reproduce it.
Up until five years ago I could browse journals on the shelves of several local colleges. But these colleges have found it much cheaper to purchase electronic subscriptions, without need journal shelf space. So the journal shelves are now a fifth or tenth of their previous size. MIT is an example. The "Great Dome", 5th floor of Bldg 10, used to house the engineering new issues shelves. But that has been migrated to small side room. The Great Dome is now a wireless center and reading lounge.
If you teach at a community college, then you ought to know that you need merely contact your community college library and they'll obtain it for you reasonably quickly and at modest or no cost.
Agree. But government agencies fund only a portion of research. Corporations, foundations and other organizations fund research as well, and some research is not paid for with grant funds at all. So, a large percentage of all published reports of research are not taxpayer funded.
during my stint as a structural engineer i found that coming across information that was beyond the basics (wind pressure, simple span beams, etc) was virtually impossible. try finding enough info on something like "parabolically haunched steel girders" or "fully tempered glass plate in edge compression" or "bi-directional catenary action (e.g. tension fabric)" via google to even make an educated opinion, much less actually calculate something. without forking out several hundred bucks in the process that is.
/rant
i understand that these people need to be able to make a profit, but i have something like 100 $100-$300 books in my personal library; and the fact that this still wasn't nearly enough to do everything i've needed to so is a problem in my eyes.
further, now that i'm in programming i find that 80% of what i need i can find online. and of the remainder a good portion can be solved by posting in a forum. the rest ends with me getting a book to further general knowledge about some topic. this is how it ought to be. it the very thing that has caused tech to blossom the way it has; and if anything it has ended in MORE money for that industry. not less.
here's an idea - stop charging so much for simple information and maybe engineers can start making the money they deserve.
Fravia+ (R.I.P.) developed a methodology of "deep web" search, here are his writings on scientific journals search:
http://www.searchlores.org/journals.htm
http://www.searchlores.org/deepweb_searching.htm
Clearly information of just about all types, except advertising and spyware, have been locked up by the SENMACE world wide.
To gain access to general information at the Phd and post doc level across the board, you just about need to be matriculated with a major university or be one the SENMACE.
You might be interested in learning that patents have been determined to be a bad, bad thing.
bu.edu/law/faculty/scholarship/workingpapers/2011.html of course you need http://www.