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Why Johnny Can't Speak: a Cost of Paywalled Research
theodp writes "That there's no easy way for her to get timely, affordable access to taxpayer-funded research that could help her patients leaves speech-language pathologist Cortney Grove, well, speechless. 'Cortney's frustration,' writes the EFF's Adi Kamdar, 'is not uncommon. Much of the research that guides health-related progress is funded by taxpayer dollars through government grants, and yet those who need this information most-practitioners and their patients-cannot afford to access it.' She says, 'In my field we are charged with using scientific evidence to make clinical decisions. Unfortunately, the most pertinent evidence is locked up in the world of academic publishing and I cannot access it without paying upwards of $40 an article. My current research project is not centered around one article, but rather a body of work on a given topic. Accessing all the articles I would like to read will cost me nearly a thousand dollars. So, the sad state of affairs is that I may have to wait 7-10 years for someone to read the information, integrate it with their clinical opinions (biases, agendas, and financial motivations) and publish it in a format I can buy on Amazon. By then, how will my clinical knowledge and skills have changed? How will my clients be served in the meantime? What would I do with the first-hand information that I will not be able to do with the processed, commercialized product that emerges from it in a decade?'"
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
NIH funded research must be put into PubMed Central, the NIH public portal, within 12 months of publishing in a journal.
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
The United States has become a nation of public financing and private profits.
A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Oh, but who has time to go there, find a place to park and then run around the stacks...?
Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for your career instead of always whining about how things should be made better just for you. The journals charge money because they incur substantial expenses for providing an important service.
JSTOR an Entitlement For US DoJ's Ortiz & Holder: "If Aaron Swartz downloaded JSTOR documents without paying for them, it would presumably be considered a crime by the USDOJ. But if U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz or U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder did the same? Rather than a crime, it would be considered their entitlement, a perk of an elite education that's paid for by their alma maters."
I believe the intent... is that all healthcare practitioners do not have private practices, but are instead employed by large healthcare conglomerates like Connecticut Life, United Healthcare, etc., and that those conglomerates have online access to the journals from their networks.
As long as you do not hang out your own shingle, and remain a wage-slave to a large corporation, you will have no problem accessing the necessary publications.
In the article, Cortney Grove says, "Some people told me to go to the local medical school library and download the articles from there. I don't know if it's feasible for me to go to a library of a school I don't go to!"
Instead of moaning and groaning, why doesn't Ms Grove find out? Ten minutes on the phone should allow her to determine whether it's feasible to go to a library of a school in which she isn't enrolled.
Become a research partner with a university find a collaborator or take a class and you'll have access to all those papers at a reduced price.
Did most of the punctuation get stuck behind a paywall?
She does explain that the problem is there's no guarantee that any of this information will be useful ("Topics in Language Disorders, for example, has a $122 subscription for four issues. But there's no guarantee that the articles I'll get in the four issues next year will be useful for me-and that's just one journal!"), and goes on to suggest she'd consider shelling out thousands for unfettered access, but that's not an option ("Even if I had to pay an acceptable yearly fee-if for $300 a month I could access everything-that would be better than how it is today).
as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expenses, and that academics provide the important parts of the service, essentially for free in the cases of most journals. It's not like putting out a magazine; we didn't even have copy or layout editors for our journal, the most inexpensive components of editorial labor. It paid the university department that hosted the journal a mere thousands (single digits) per year. There were two "paid" staffers—myself and one other person, The rest of the "editorial board" consisted of faculty of our and another several universities doing the work for free, under the auspices of the "professional duties" of the academics involved (not as paid by Springer, as paid by their respective institutions). Peer reviewers—free. Editorial labor (copy, layout to production files according to specs, submissions queue, even rough line editing, style work)—graduate students looking for a title to add to their emerging CVs.
Essentially Springer's total cost for putting out the journal amounted to the several thousand (again, single digit thousands, split between myself and one other individual) that they (usually belatedly) paid our department annually for the entire journal in its substance, plus printing/distribution (a pittance given the circulation size of academic journals and the cost per print subscription—not to mention the increasing number of electronic-only subscriptions). They had one liason that handled our entire "account," and the level of labor involved allowed this person to be "over" several _dozen_ journals as just a single person. That's as much a labor footprint, in its entirety, as our journal actually had inside the "publisher."
And for this, they held onto the reprint/reuse rights with an iron fist, requiring even authors and PIs to pay $$$ to post significant excerpts on their own blogs.
Seeing the direction the wind has been blowing over the last half-decade, the department decided (and rightfully so) that it's basically a scam, that academic publishing as we know it need not exist any longer, and wound down both the print journal and the relationship with Springer several years ago, instead self-publishing the journal (which is easy these days) to much higher revenue for the department, and the ability to sensibly manage rights in the interest of academic production and values, rather than in the interest of Springer's oinking at the trough on the backs of academics.
Oh, and many university libraries (particularly in urban areas) do not admit just anyone off the street; you must generally hold an ID that grants access to the library (often student or faculty, plus a paid option for the general public, either monthly or annually, that can vary from somewhat affordable to somewhat expensive). Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacks—and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
As an academic, I have the same frustration. We bemoan the state of science in this society, yet under the existing publishing model we essentially insure that only a rarefied few scientists and the very wealthy elite have access to science at all. $30-$60 is not a small amount for the average person—and that is the cost to read _one_ article, usually very narrowly focused, and of unclear utility until they've already paid the money, that is borderline unreadable for the layperson (or for the magazine author hoping to make sense of science _for_ the layperson) anyway. Why, exactly, would we expect anyone to know any science at all beyond university walls, under this arrangement?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"irritating," not "irritable," my apologies for the misuse of the word (it's late where I am); and I should note that the department had to change the name of the journal and all of its graphics as they brought it entirely in-house and severed the Springer relationship, since Springer held the rights to everything, including all past issues, meaning that the new journal is just that—a clean slate, post-Springer (and good riddance).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Nothing yet. I ended up emailing a professor of mine from school, and I'm waiting to hear back from her, while at the same time asking her, "Is there a more reasonable way for me to do this?"
Some people told me to go to the local medical school library and download the articles from there. I don't know if it's feasible for me to go to a library of a school I don't go to! And at the moment, I don't really know any students who I could ask.
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States,
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
/Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't. When enough people do this the present journals will change their policies or be left out of the market.
Right now your trying to be the tail that wagged the dog. Stop being the tail and start realizing that there are far more academics than journals and organize a new journal. With the Internet it is absurdly easy to communicate with like kind peers and set up a self publishing site for very little money.
At some point you have to realize that the journals need the academics more than the academics need the journals. A small number of professional journals are holding up millions of academics. Stop being the tail, start being the dog.
She will have to find out:
1) Which libraries have _print_ as opposed to _electronic only_ subscriptions, and
2) Amongst those that do not (I'm guessing the majority), which allow access to electronic resources by non-students/non-faculty (this kind of access is expressly forbidden, at any cost, by many subscription packages offered to universities).
Even if she is able to identify a library that offers non-affiliated individuals access, she will have to pony up whatever the cost of access for the public to the library is, and then, at that stage, she will have access to _one_ journal. It is unlikely that all of the resources that she needs are to be found in that _one_ journal, and much more likely that relevant material is published in several or even several dozen journals, in which case all she has to do is grill library personnel for 20-30 minutes with a detailed list in each phone call, and likely pony up the access fees (and the transportation, and the saturday mornings) to jump around from one library to another on a wild goose chase over many weeks to piece together the materials that an academic can assemble over a cup of coffee without leaving their screen. Just who, pray, are the academics producing their research _for_? Surely those who might actually be able to use it practically?
All of this stuff can technically be accessed from her office, too, in the space of 10 minutes, but for the profit-oriented restrictions (that do not reflect costs, see my previous post) imposed by journal "publishers."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Whether or not taxpayer-funded research should be accissible to the taxpayers for FREE is a matter to be acertained, but the fact is that it is no longer possible for anyone, including the professional researchers, to know where to find the result of the various facet of related research on a given field.
It is as if we are back to the pre-Internet days.
Before Internet, it was a Herculean task to find out if there had been a research carried out on any particular subject, simply because there was no one central database.
When Internet first arrived, the situation was greatly improved - although there were still no centralized database for all research results, at the very least we could search for it online.
Now ?
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Paywall does not only representing GREED that is retarding the progress of the human society, it is actually STRANGLING the progress of scientific research.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
if we created the space, would academia not use it?
is it not up to us to resolve this?
if it worked for wikileaks, why would it not work here?
I don't think of Elmer Fudd as having a speech impediment as much as being a speaker of a nonstandard dialect, one that labializes the /r/ and /l/ sounds. In college, I had a computer science professor from Bulgaria whose /l/ sounded almost like /w/.
TFS talks about a Cortney Grove, but who's Johnny?
Privatize the profits and socialize the costs. Hey, it worked for Wall street. Do tax payers receive a dividend when bailed out banks turn a profit? Not fucking likely. Do the CEOs have their wages garnisheed for the bailouts on their watch? Again, not fucking likely. Yet these people are still convinced they built the log cabin they were born in.
should it not be as simple as a wiki?
There does exist a site for uploading preprints called arXiv. The difference is that preprints aren't peer reviewed and thus aren't quite as citable in publications that strongly prefer "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy".
I paid for much of the research with tax money. Why must I pay again to read it?
Welcome to die!
Who are you? Where in the F are you going to school that you don't have access to a research database that has all and more of the articles you need? Look, I agree: The situation is fuk'd. Any and every American should have access to any research that had even 1 cent of of taxpayer dollars involved in its production. However, I'm suspicious of this article, because even Phoenix University students have access to the majority of EBSCO's journals. I've casually searched around on that DB and come across articles relevant to your topic. Moreover, I've specifically searched for topics that should have nothing at all to do with speech therapy, and yet every now and then I find one mixed in for no apparent reason. There are a ton of articles in that realm.
I tend to run liberal, so why I am so incensed by your post? Is it, perhaps, because you start with an incendiary statement about how a group of terribly, unfairly unfortunate people (those who need speech therapy) are being kept from easy solutions to their problems, simply because of greedy profiteers . . . and yet somehow never explicitly state what amazing solution it is they are being kept from?
Actually, no, it's because IF you are actually as smart as the person who wrote this piece and IF you are actually in school and IF you are actually working on a dissertation, then you are either in the worst fucking school I've ever heard of and too stupid to realize it, or you are someone who is manipulating people by playing upon their good-natured desire to help those less fortunate. Why you would do such a thing baffles me. Whoever you are, please stop being either a.) such an asshole or b.) such a whiny, self-sabotaging muck-about.
It's been my experience that access to non-US journals may not be so restricted. I've found relevant articles in UK journals for instance that aren't paywalled when the equivalent US journals were. Not all countries or scientific organizations are as greedy as they often seem to be in the U S. Unfortunately, you may have to find a translator or wing it with translation software if it's not an english-language source, but at least there are a few alternatives out there. And if you're a scientist in the US, you may be able to submit your papers to non-paywalled sources, possibly in addition to the paywalled ones, or host the papers on your own website, etc., making them more accessible. Paywalled sources are not the only game out there, you may just have to dig a little more.
Ignore my post about who could be such a stupid fucking student. It's not. It's a cheap practitioner with too high of an opinion of herself coupled with the EFF's increasingly exaggerated and ridiculous reporting. I get that you're driving a heard of morons, EFF, but did you really have to sell your soul so quickly and cheaply?
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that? CAS Scifinder and STN (subscription based services) will get me more granular results than Google Scholar, but I find plenty of paywalled results when I use Google Scholar or PubMed. What is being blocked?
Unfortunately, even in commie land, which is pretty cool (we have gov't cheese and beer), the USofA finds a way to profit off the proletariat. Recall if you will Tetris, the game EA, SEGA, Nintendo, Atari, and countless others made millions on. Care to guess how much money the author made? (Hint: It's a whole lot of nothing.)
I remember Tetris! I never paid for it either! Only rich capitalist pigs paid for Tetris!
As a second year PhD candidate without access to every journal article that interests me, I've found that simply looking up one of the author's email address (usually published on their university webpage) and asking for a copy of the article works quite well. Every author likes it when someone shows interest in their work and as it can also lead to more citations, there's no reason for them to refuse. It might be a pain to do when you need a few hundred articles, but I would expect that most if not all of the authors would have a pdf attached to their reply.
Most of the material I need to look up is fairly recent and therefore available via preprint archives. Also it is fairly easy to contact authors directly to ask questions, and have colleagues in parts of the world with access to the paid stuff. Basically Springer and their ilk are very much on the wrong side of history. They're dead in the water and all their activity from now on is basically trying to die, not with dignity, but with disgrace, leeching off as much money as can be had before the inevitable demise.
Consider your peer in a developing country, they'll have to wait
* Forever. (trade secret)
* 70-160 years. (copyright term)
* 20 years. (patent term)
These seem way too long to me.
go to a library, or look up the articles and e-Mail the authors for reprints.
quit voting for assclowns
I completely agree. Two weeks ago I was looking for a paper and had to pay $35 to read it (actually the company paid, but that's not the point). I felt like I'd been hustled. It definitely does not cost $35 to serve a .PDF on the internet.
The proprietary publishers have established an elaborate co-dependency relationship with academics. Academics depend on journal editorships and citations for promotion. Editors get many perks and prestige as a result of being an editor, but the selection of who becomes the editor is up to the publisher. Reviewers get pre-publication access to results. Yes, the reviewers are supposed to hold the information in confidence, but does pre-publication access help them in thinking about which directions to take in their own work? Absolutely. An extensive web of co-dependence has evolved between the proprietary publishers and the academic community.
Academics generally do not receive royalties from journal articles, but they do from book publications. Who publishes those books? The same publishers that publish the proprietary journals. Who selects which authors will be invited to publish books? The publishers.
Elite institutions and large university systems negotiate discounted and preferred subscription agreements giving their researchers free access to a wide range of journals, which in turn makes it more attractive for academic "stars" to go to those institutions. The faculty at those schools benefit from these favorable access agreements. Are we surprised that University of California faculty voted against open access?
It is also not just speech and language research. The majority of work in fields like cancer research is also published in paywalled journals. Cancer patients may not be able to wait a year before articles appear in open access archives.
The vast majority of academic work is supported by public funding, and charitable foundations support most of what is not government supported. High time to require open access. The academics are not going to do it themselves.
Statesman
Why should this be different than any other medical research. The US medical system is built on companies, hospitals, etc., profiting on people being sick. Why would research and research publications be any different?
If you want this to change, you need to change the system. It is possible for healthcare to serve the common good instead of the shareholder and still return a yield on investment. It did exactly that until the 1980s.
All other posts so far seem to focus on the obvious, i.e. journals are pay-walled, too expensive, researchers/reviewers do all the work, etc, but why is nobody looking for a (legal) solution to the problem? In fact, there is a solution which is really simple and will leave all parties satisfied.
Researchers do some research and want it published. They want to publish it in a known and respected journal. Let's say the journal is owned by Elsevier, because I know for a fact that my solution will work with this publisher. The researchers go through all the submission, peer review, editing and proofreading process and then they get the article published and pay-walled. So far, it's business as usual. What most people seem to ignore (because who reads the article submission agreement, right?) is that Elsevier only owns the very final version of the article, i.e. after the final formatting is in place. This means that you can take the article version with all peer-review corrections, but without the final journal-specific formatting (that includes logos and such), and make it available for free on the website of your research institute or university. This is perfectly legal and acceptable practice. In fact, lots of people are doing it, but we still like to complain about research papers being too expensive. Before slamming down 40 bucks for an article, do a Google search with filetype:pdf. Maybe you'll find it for free, courtesy of an open-minded researcher.
Also, nobody can complain: Elsevier got the article and can sell it to unsuspected researchers and libraries, the researchers got published without paying anything, and the general public got open access to the research findings. The only caveat is that there is no guarantee that the content of the article on the researcher's website it identical to the one in the journal. But I'm prepared to take the researcher's word for this, since if I'm reading their article, they already have my trust concerning the content of their research.
So there. Stop moaning and put those PDFs online, that's what I say.
That which is funded by the taxpayer does not belong to The People.
We don't live in a communist country. We live in a Political-Corporate Oligarchy where wealth is taken from the common class and funneled to the ruling class, and the product of that wealth is kept for themselves.
There is a trend to publish on Open Access jurnals, such as PloS One, which charge the authors (about 2K) to cover the publishing costs. Then the access for anyone is free. Even Nature offers the choice to publish as open access.
It may be argued that 2K is too expensive and that if the author pays for the publication costs there is a conflict of interests. But the trend is clear. It's now a matter of adjusting the costs.
Socializing costs, privatizing profits. That's how money is made in science (and banking and almost everything else) these days.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
This is so amusing Scientific articles are being paywalled and locked up, while movie&music industry has serious containment problem :D
and guess what which one of these were supposed to be public and open to all?
literally it's easier to get movies from internet for free via torrent than finding scientific articles
and situation is even more ridiculous as some countries used to have university libraries with computers that could access most publications free... guess what... not anymore... and there even isn't paper versions avail.
This is especially annoying if your trying to tackle some problem, youll find study that refers to another study concluded by another party... and guess what at this point its already pointing to paywalled article most likely... thus your left in situation that you just read scientific article based on foundations of another that your not accessing without paying... meaning you just wasted your time and in order NOT to waste time you can undo this by paying 40 dollars :D
And wars / rebuilding / corporatization of security-theatre infrastructure. God bless your corrupt-assed one-bad-apple-in-the-world's-barrel country.
I work in academia so I have access to most of the journals I need but not all. When I hit a paywall, I either Google for the PDF (a lot of authors chuck their papers on the web somewhere even if it's "illegal") or I e-mail the authors. Many papers are available free with a year delay. I've never, ever, had to pay at the wall to get a paper I needed. I know the scientific article situation is bad in many ways, but you don't have to wait multiple years for access: use your brain and get it some other way.
soylentnews.org
First, I agree with the premise of the FP. Any publicly funded research should come with an absolutely unavoidable requirement to publish in a form open to everyone for free. I have no problem with dual-publishing, for example in both JAMA and PLoS Medicine - Though in that case, JAMA does have a problem with it and would refuse the submission - But people absolutely must have some way to get at your publicly funded research for free.
But more seriously, aside from the "public funding" angle of this, how does it happen that a doctor trying to use cutting-edge research on their patients doesn't have an institutional affiliation through which they could get access to journal articles basically for free? This alone makes me somewhat wary of Grove's legitimacy. Not an adjunct? No admission rights?
Hell, for a practical short-term solution - Sign up for a single class each semester at the local state university (you need to take CEs anyway to keep your license), and you'll have access to journals in languages you've never even heard of. Longer term solution? Publish, and tell anyone who will listen that you did it in an open access journal specifically to snub the likes of Elsevier.
It still costs money to print a journal - copy editors, etc all have salaries that need to be paid. Lots of scientific societies (American Physical Society is the one I'm a member of) print journals as part of their scientific mission. These are all non-profit organizations relying on unpaid peer reviewers. I can't find the numbers for the most recent fiscal year, but publishing accounts for almost all their expenses. If they had to give away any research funded by the government (and virtually everything coming out of a US university is - industry funding of physics basic research is basically a rounding error) they would have to either stop publishing or go out of business, and we would lose the single most important series of journals in physics (The Physical Review).
Free (beer) sounds good, but its not realistic. Even RMS has always said that publishing and distribution are reasonable costs for free software; journal articles are no different. If you don't want to pay $125, you can always get copies the old-fashioned way - drive to the nearest university and make photocopies for a few cents a page.
period
So we physicists have Arxiv.org, where pretty much every recently published paper is available for free, often months before a journal has finally got round to actually publishing the article. Does medical research not have anything comparable?
Socializing costs, privatizing profits. That's how money is made in science (and banking and almost everything else) these days.
And sports stadium funding (at least in the US; that's all I know about). In that case though, they socialize the costs and the risk, and privatize the profits.
Just apply for a taxpayer grant to pay for your paywalled access to the material...
Nearly every occupation has operational costs. This is yours. A thousand dollars a year is only ~1.5% of the income of an speech and language pathologist... I'm not crying for you, Argentina. If you're really strapped for cash, go use a library, that's what they're for. If you want the luxury of sitting at home and sipping your coffee while you browse the latest and greatest published in Science, then pay up. I'm a recent ex-*student* (not a 80k/yr salaried SLP), and I have yet to find an article that I can't find free access to. At worst, you can sign up for your alumni association and get access to their library proxy and get articles that way (for $40/yr, or $400/lifetime or so).
most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore
I seriously challenge this point, although I'm no more a fan of paywalls than you are. Abstracts are always available and searchable.
Actually, no: for general research, there was Readers' guide to periodical literature, and for specific topics (such as particle physics) there were similar catalog-format databases. You buy the database, you get the periodicals, and you use interlibrary loan.
Information was much freer back then.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm sure there are lots of exceptions but when I worked in academia I had no problem getting access to journals and this was the earliesh days of the internet (98-2000). Universities generally have access for all the main journals. My field (physics) generally has a habit of publishing pre-published papers to "the archives" which are free (also have engineering and comp sci papers there). Technically you aren't supposed to since most/all journals stipulate that the articles you are submitting are original unpublished research but they let it slide.
Next up conferences/incestual relationships: in a narrow field (which lets be honest is where most academics end up working) your PhD supervisor is either THE expert in the field or did their grad work/post doc with one of the few people that are. You go to conferences with a 100 plus people all with their own networks of experts from different continents. Finding who is doing something interesting isn't hard. The people/politics is what is hard: convincing them to collaborate, share unpublished results etc. Once it is published they'll happily send you a pdf, talk your ear off at a bar etc.
The people that complain about lack of access (and I've become one of them to a small extent) is people that no longer work directly in academia, no longer work full time on R & D, and/or are working on their own on side projects and would really like access. For most of us if we really cared we could drop ~$200 a year and get electronic access via our local university's community library access programs. We just don't care enough to spend $200 of our own money or take a 30min drive somewhere which to be honest acts as a filter to those that are unlikely to be current enough and willing to put in enough effort to make a meaningful contribution.
I don't care whether you pay taxes or not. If you are a member of the public, research done on the public dime should be accessible to you without additional costs other than what it actually costs to provide the data itself. In the age of the Internet, it is inexcusable for that to mean anything but freely available publicly-funded servers.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I agree. The article, and a lot of the commenters, are ignoring the fact that these costs ~$40 per article - are only for single servings outside a research facility or library. I'm inside a university right now and I can pull down nearly any paper I'd care to. The few that I can't access directly can usually be had by emailing an author and asking for it. No one has said no yet. More to the point, the article quotes a practitioner. If she wants to read recent research relevant to her work, is she not affiliated with a hospital? A college? Even a library? It's very hard to believe that she is so isolated and want to remain free of affiliations, and also represents the common practitioner. And a corollary suggests itself; if she's so isolated from academia, is she qualified to even read and make decisions based upon raw research? There's a reason why an aftermarket exists to digest research and integrate it into practical guidelines. I agree fully that casual access from the Web is very restricted, I would love to see the gates opened. But jumping from the difficulty of access to claiming an impact on patients is bullshit. If the data mattered, it's trivial to collect whatever access you need.
Whether or not taxpayer-funded research should be accessible to the taxpayers for FREE is a matter to be acertained,
Well, in a sense, any American has already paid for that research (via tax dollars). Probably the only time geofencing restrictions would make sense to use. (Wouldn't want us Canadians freeloading on ya!)
Look at it this way - if you substitute "taxpayer" with "Walmart" ("Whether or not Walmart-funded research should be accessible to Walmart for free.."), the argument suddenly sounds silly - why *wouldn't* the people who paid for it get to see it?
Your assertion doesn't make it right, and even making the assertion makes you a potential target of some sort. Be careful what you say, it can come back to haunt you in a changed future.
A doctor with an affiliation to a major research hospital would probably have access. A doctor whose affiliation is with a smaller hospital, especially a for-profit one, likely would not.
given the half-life of facts, in general, i still feel more comfortable with a living debate, than with published results
Including things in Wikipedia that are still under heavy debate smacks of recentism, but that's why there are plenty of other sites.
for instance, how many pro tobacco articles can you find, if you go back far enough?
Wikipedia recognizes that consensus can change, both in project space (WP:CCC) and in article space. When the consensus of reliable sources has changed, Wikipedia would likely handle it roughly as follows: "In $year, tobacco was widely believed healthy.[6][7][8]"
as an open source fanatic, i am certain that all we need to do is open source all academic work
Enough other people hold this position that Wikipedia has an article about it.
it would seem we are getting there.