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Nature Makes All Articles Free To View
An anonymous reader writes: Scientific journal publishers have been under pressure recently by both scientists and the public to relax their restrictive rules on the sharing of information. Now, Macmillan has announced that its Nature Publishing Group will make all research papers free to read. This will require the use of proprietary viewing software, but it's a step in the right direction. "Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. "To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access," says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. 'With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway,' he says. But Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the program is a step forward in that it eliminates the six-month embargo that NPG demands for free archiving of manuscripts."
You need a proprietary reader (just Windows and OS X). You need an institutional license if you want to access the older reports, and you need a subscription to access those going back just a few years.
So is the DRM broken yet?
No? I'll check back in 10 minutes...
Liberty in your lifetime
"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."
I'd be willing to pay money to not have to use that piece of crap.
How can folks be so arrogant to assume that a professional hasn't got her workflows up and running? We are't thrilled to get *your* workflow and *the other publisher's workflow* all of them pushed down our throats.
And we, the researchers, libraries and students are collateral damage of the turf wars of the platforms. Thanks, but no thanks. Go play bingo or blackjack in some casino, but leave us the fuck alone.
I'll take paper over this mess any day.
Often if you Google "ARTICLE TITLE" + PDF you will find a paywalled research somewhere. Researchers want their papers read and will often host them on their websites.
soylentnews.org
"Make sure ReadCube is available on ALL platforms, not just a few blessed ones. Your job since you impose the fscking thing."
I think it is a great news and they are setting a precedent.
With luck the software they chose for this will place a high enough load on their webservers that they will eventually collapse under the load. Once that happens they will need to seek out a way to distribute the papers that doesn't reduce their servers to smouldering rubble; there is a good chance that situation will force them to just start letting everyone view the papers as regular PDF without additional software.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But really, all scientific articles should be freely available from the command line for text mining.
Who do you work for, the MPAA, the RIAA, or one of the governments that's in bed with these guys?
I ask because you know, I know, we all know, DRM is ALWAYS harmful. It's right in the name: restriction. It's preventing the user from performing an action that could easily be done for no good reason (and no, making even more profit is not a good reason)
Mature Makes All Articles Free To View
Why is there an article about MILFs on SlashDot?
Give it all away for FREE! Have you ever produced content that has value? Have you ever tried to live off of sales of that content?
If you are a College professor trying to get tenure, you want stuff "published" just to have it on your resume.
People who write VALUEABLE articles would like some compensation for it. Even if that compensation comes from ad revenue from the eyeballs reading the article.
Nature is still on my SH*T list, along with the NYT and the Washington Post. I always check from whence articles are linked on news aggrgator sites (such as this), and if the link is on my SH*T list, no clicks.
The thing with academic articles is the people and who write the articles and the organisations they work for DON'T get any compensation from the journals. In many cases the reviewers don't either. This applies regardless of whether the paper is worthless drek or a major breakthrough.
People are getting pissed off with a model where research paid for primerally by taxpayers and performed by universities is locked up by journals for their own profit.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
> (and be careful of your speling).
Ha!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
People are getting pissed off with a model where research paid for primerally by taxpayers and performed by universities is locked up by journals for their own profit.
This!
If only researchers didn't get compensated. To have my paper appear in the proceedings of a conference, my employer has to pay an entry to send me speak (aka contribute more content to their paywalled garden) over there. That's _after_ the reviewers said "having this paper in our proceedings wouldn't make us look bad."
Humanity has long passed moved beyond survival of the individual. Survival of the species is the only thing that has value today.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You have a funny definition of value. Those articles by college professors who want to be published for glory and tenure lay the foundation for virtually all the technological advances of our civilization. But I'm supposed to believe they're less valuable than a some story/painting/recording that nobody will remember a century from now?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Nature Makes All Particles Free To View
Trippy.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A lot of academics read papers on tablets now.
Is this a ploy to get people to buy Surface Pro tablets, which run Windows?
If your platform doesn't support all of [Android, Kindle, and iOS] (including integrating with the apps that people use for bibliography management and annotation on these devices) then it's dead in the water.
Say a platform says "Android and Kindle Fire: Download reader from Google Play or Amazon Appstore now! iOS: Coming soon." If this is is unacceptable, then how does it benefit anyone to keep the Android reader unavailable to the public pending approval of the iOS reader by Apple?
Sure, a DRM platform owner could document the interface. But it would require a player key, which your reader won't get unless it's non-free (to meet robustness requirements).
What problems did you encounter when trying ReadCube for Windows in Wine? Its AppDB currently does not list ReadCube. Or is it like PunkBuster and GFWL, which intentionally require bit-perfect copies of Windows system files to be present on the disk?
If only researchers didn't get compensated.
They don't, in fact they have to give Nature money and copyright to get their article published and that's after reviewers have said "this changes everything". What every researcher wants is to be published in Nature or Science, such a paper is more valuable to their career than their Phd. These journals are #1 and #2 in academic rankings because they have built up that reputation over a century or more. Yeah, their business model needs to open up but you can't blame them for being cautious, nobody wants to see either institution go belly up (other than the anti-science mob).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The question is, will Nature be "free" going forward? If not, what limitations will be put on it.
Reading the article, it seems that the way this is going to work is that non-subscribers cannot access nature articles (which is disappointing), but anyone who does have access to the articles can share them with anyone who does not have access.
It is still a much better solution than the current one, which requires you to either pay or to login to your institution and search.
At least it is a step in the right direction.
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captcha = lawsuit