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Should All Research Papers Be Free? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader points us to an article at The New York Times: There's a battle raging over whether all academic research papers should be made free to all. These academic papers are typically locked behind paywalls, and only those who have access to the university network and pay a premium subscription fee get to read these papers. "Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research," said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. "The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis" that is possible when articles aren't "sitting on various siloed databases."
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them. Swartz died over this.
If federal funds helped to pay for the paper, why isn't it publicly available? We (the people) have already paid for the work to be done, we should be able to see the results.
Agreed. (I'm a researcher; thanks for the pay!)
In the field of medicine, in the US, federal guidelines now state that any publications based on research funded by the NIH must be publicly available. The journals capitulated, and now make special arrangements if you tick a box during submission saying that you have received NIH funding.
In physics and astronomy, worldwide, almost every paper that is published in a journal is also published by the authors on the free preprint server arxiv.org . The journals don't like researchers making their preprints freely available, but any journal that forbade it would quickly find that no one submitted papers to them any more.
Generally, researchers want their work to be freely available, because they want people to read it. The only obstacle is the journals, and they're losing ground.