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."

Comments

What about all the non-researchers?

[Wycliffe]

If I was a real researcher with a real budget, I would be happy to fork over a couple bucks to read an
article I needed to reference in my research but I would guess that there are alot more non-researchers
like typical slashdot reader than actual real researchers. I also turn to google when I hit a paywall
because it's usually more of a passing interest and I'm not going to pay $5 to $35 to read an article
that I might only understand half of anyways but it would sure be nice if there was a way to give
access to the non-professional general public as a way to pass on useful knowledge instead of hiding
it behind a paywall where only a select few people in the same field are willing to pay for it.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[blueg3]

Academic researchers rarely pay for articles (in my experience). However, their institutions often have access through subscriptions purchased by the library.

They also frequently use Google Scholar to find free copies of paywalled articles that the don't have access to. It's a great approach. Another solution is to find the contact e-mail of the lead author and politely ask him for a preprint copy.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[JoshuaZ]

Very little. You don't generally get paid for papers. The money from the journals in almost all fields goes to the publishers, not anyone in the field.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[Tsiangkun]

we generally pay to be published in the glossy covered journals. The direction of travel for the money is from the researchers to the journals.

Re:What about all the non-researchers?

[interkin3tic]

Researchers at universities generally have access through their host institution. This is still annoying as your university then has to waste millions of dollars subscribing to every crappy elsevier journal out there, using money from your grants. And there will still be an interesting-sounding article in a journal your university decided not to pay the toll for. And if you're at home, you have to log in via VPN to read it.

All because researchers prefer to focus on their research rather than shaking off parasites.

Already?

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Free copies?

[blueg3]

A very large fraction of them are preprints posted by the authors. Usually legally.

Re:Author's Personal Websites

[barlevg]

Journals also typically allow you to put your article on arXiv. In general, I'm pretty sure you retain the rights to your own article. As an example: the American Institute of Physics' Transfer of Copyright Agreement [pdf] allows the author

to give permission to third parties to republish print versions of the Article or a translation thereof, or excerpts therefrom, without obtaining permission from AIP Publishing LLC, provided the Publisher-prepared version is not used for this purpose, the Article is not published in another conference proceedings or journal, and the third party does not charge a fee.

In other words, as long as you're not using the corrections you get back from AIP's peer review process, you can put your article anywhere that doesn't charge a fee and isn't a journal. The agreement goes on to EXPLICITLY grant you the right to the journal-edited version on your own personal webpage or on arXiv.

Which half?

[TentativeFate]

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?

Re:Which half?

[tlhIngan]

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?

My thoughts exactly. Or not even that - how about the papers you want to read? It doesn't matter if 99% of the papers are available for free if the one you want is paywalled only!

And it assumes that it's an even distribution - that in all fields, a paper you want has a 50% chance of being free (or you can find an equivalent for free). Depending on the field and the article, this assuming is not true at all.

Email the author(s)

[John Bokma]

If Google with the title of the paper and filetype:pdf fails just email one of the authors. So far I have been able to get papers that way.

For example I am interested in scorpions and am in contact with several professionals who answered in the beginning my questions and helped me to ID species I encountered. Now, years later, I have found a few new species and we've been on field trips to collect those. But before that I was already on a mailing list to which new papers where mailed on a regular basis before official publication.

Possibly, not every researcher has the time or patience to deal with laymen / amateurs but so far my experience has been great. The arachnid researchers I've emailed with (and still am in contact with) and been on field trips have been extremely friendly and respectful to me. To me a very fresh breeze compared to the IT world where a lot of people who think they know something are constantly out there to stamp down on people thinking they look smarter that way :-( (Hello, Slashdot!)