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Half of All Research Papers Published In 2011 Already Free To Read
ananyo writes "Search the Internet for any research article published in 2011, and you have a 50-50 chance of downloading it for free. This claim — made in a report produced for the European Commission — suggests that many more research papers are openly available online than was previously thought. Previous best estimates for the proportion of papers free online run at around 30%. Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says the report confirms his optimism. 'When researchers hit a paywall online, they turn to Google to search for free copies — and, increasingly, they are finding them,' he says."
There's a question of convenience.
I was doing some reasearch at work into computer vision systems. I could have asked for them to allocate a certain budget for buying the papers, but that would involved going through several laers of bureaucracy to authorise this. It was easier to seach for the authors.
There's also the fact that it's not always possible to tell whether this is going to be useful from the abstract, and most people have an aversion to wasting money.
Considering that in the EU a nontrivial amount of research grants are paid by taxpayer money, I'd say "already" is not the term I was thinking of. "only" would be more the qualifier that qualifies.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If I was a real researcher with a real budget, I would be happy to fork over a couple bucks to read an article
No, you wouldn't. You see, 80% of everything is crap. Actually it's more like 99%.
Given the wildly misleading titles and abstract, sometimes because they are just bizarrely off the wall, sometimes because thy overinterpret the results and sometimes because they are just optimistic or badly written, most papers you can dismiss before you read the whole thing.
Of the ones that remain and are actually genuinely relevant, 80% are crap.
Sure $2 for a useful paper wouldn't be too bad, but you have to read beyond the abstract in perhaps 10 or 20 papers. The cost rapidly mounts up. And the faff and annoyance.
You'd start to get really pissed off really fast if you kept spending $2 on utter wastes of time.
Actually, very many researchers want their work to be freely avaliable, and almost all of them stick the work somewhere it can be freely downloaded, such as on their website. If you don't, then you lose citations and that is important.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Half of all research papers are not worth the paper they will never be printed on.
How many peer-reviewed papers are free to read?