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

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.