Slashdot Mirror


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."

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Already? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  2. Re:Free copies? by blueg3 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. Re:What about all the non-researchers? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Author's Personal Websites by barlevg · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.