ScienceLeaks
scienceleaks.blogspot.com
scienceleaks.blogspot.com
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
However some of the research published in traditional journals is funded from elsewhere and, as such, I can't think of any reason why we "deserve" free access to it.
On the other hand, all the scientists I know wish they could give their papers away for free because it builds their reputation to have people use and cite them, even undergrads at state colleges that can't afford the bigger database subscriptions.
Except for textbooks, scholars almost never make royalties, so the profit incentive isn't what you might think. A scholar makes more money by getting raises from the university, speaking and consulting fees, and publishing undergrad textbooks (sometimes). All of these are increased if their is a wider dissemination of their work.
Finally, .... in the US, almost all research is funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly, it's just NIH funded stuff that must be free.
Finally, finally .... if it weren't for the fact that the prestigious journals are a ticket to tenure and promotion, there would be no reason to publish anywhere except for Arxiv: so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system...
To misquote Churchill:
Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.
[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase
[2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill
PS: Don't rely too much on dictionary.com, it's not the best. E.g. the New Oxford American Dictionary correctly gives the second meaning of "paraphrase: a rewording of something written or spoken by someone else".
In the pre-internet days, peer review like this prevented some bullshit from wasting the relatively scarce resources used by paper / USPS distribution and storage. Today it is just goofy, and only serves as a weird sort of evaluation procedure of scholars who rack up "scholarship points" just like some weird game of monopoly.
What about all the crap that gets "published" electronically, you ask? Almost by definition a "subfield" is a collection of people able to evaluate each other's work; if everybody in a subfield gets emails when a new paper is available, they ALL evaluate it via the internet (chat/ email/ etc), and they are all peers, and we see the old school scholarly distribution system to be parasitic ...
.... except there is no other way to rack up "scholarship points", so people continue to submit to the old school journals with their crusty old reviewers and their bullshit.
As to the purpose of peer review and whether it's still needed: Biology/chemistry is huge and there are probably 100-200 journals that each publish ~50 papers/month that are potentially relevant to my work. I skim them all (and use e-mail alerts to notify me of anything especially relevant) but I certainly don't have time to read them all with sufficient depth to be critical. As such, I rely on editors and reviewers to pre-screen papers and only let the highest quality research into the most-prestigious journals. The system is, of course, flawed in many ways... but, if nothing else, the competitive-ness of the top-journals "keeps the riff-raff out". With the exception of articles that are directly relevant to me, I only take a close look at papers that appear in the top ~5 journals because most of the lower-tier journals are pretty boring. My behavior is pretty typical, from what I've seen in my field.
In a perfect world I'd have enough time to evaluate everything on it's own merit, but I don't (no-one does). But if a paper has made it into a good-to-great journal, that at least means that (a) an editor thought it was interesting and (b) three or four respected scientists read it carefully and thought it was pretty good. As you pointed out, there are lots of places where this system can err, but overall it does a pretty good job and serves my needs well. It's sort of like the point-system on HN: good comments sometimes get missed, and bad comments sometimes get up-voted... but overall it's a pretty effective way to help people separate the interesting from the banal or trivial.
That isn't clear - the relationship between a journal and an author is generally that the author retains copyright ownership (i.e. there is no assignment), but grants a copyright license to the journal, and in the case of non-open access journals, the license is generally largely exclusive.
Linking to a PDF put up by the author (i.e. the copyright holder) is not copyright infringement, because the copyright owner has clearly authorised it. However, the author may, in some cases, be breaching their contract with the journal, and if the site operators deliberately incite people to breach contracts, it could be tortious interference. However, in many cases, even where the journal has an exclusive license, the terms often allow for preprints to be distributed, sometimes immediately, and sometimes after a specific amount of time.
Also it's hosted on Google Blogger which will respond to DMCA complaints and enforce their TOS ("Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service"), so it won't last long anyway.
It should be ScienceTorrents.
Buy your own domain with private whois, servers in europe, etc.
Who gives a crap? there are plenty of laws on the books that you should be honored to violate.
Rip. Rar. Host. Upload. Seed. Knowledge wants to be free.
I agree with Rosie that the current system of paywalls is horribly broken. (I spent 10 years in academia, so I have some idea about the system). The example cited (the "arsenic life" paper) happens all the time: you hear about some exciting new discovery, only to find that the paper is locked behind a paywall. This is NOT how it should be!
With the Internet, there is no reason for most (any?) of these pay journals to exist in their current form. The research is typically funded by the government (like the NASA "arsenic life" research), so why should its findings be closed?
We (in the CS/EE field) should be taking the lead here and getting rid of ACM and IEEE journals. After many years as a member, I cancelled my ACM and IEEE memberships because it was clear that these organizations existed solely to support themselves.
There are some courageous authors out there who will put up copies of their papers for public access. I even know of one author who put up a PDF of a book that he published. We need more such authors!
That said, I don't support this site.
Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to upload some papers to this site. How can I be sure that it'll never be traced back to me?
Ensure that you're not the only person who owns the copy you're uploading (it could be watermarked or be a unique revision of the document).
Upload via TOR or similar.
If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.
The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.
Warning: Pet peeve alert.
Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma.
Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost.
Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.
(You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.)
The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature. Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train.
Even in the Boston area I have yet to find a neighborhood library with a Nature subscription.
If, in fact, you know where I can legally get access to, say, the Nature and Science journals without either paying hundreds of dollars a year or physically traveling to the local college library please, please paste the instructions here.
Sorry. :(
You'll have to actually physically walk into the libraries, which some campuses make it harder than necessary (mostly due to bad parking planning, see UCSC), but campuses like Berkeley are very easy to walk onto.
With grant money being tight, and university administration pushing for meaningless metrics such as "number of papers published" to rank professors, publishing in open access journals can add up. Furthermore, many areas of study do not yet have good open access options.
Putting up content on a public website may sound great, but is not an option. Despite the problems with peer review, it remains the best and only way to both vet published work as well as uphold some level of quality.
The public does not help with the financial aspects either. While the public feels that managers in successful companies fully deserve outrageously high salaries, and that those companies themselves deserve incredible profit margins, the same sentiments do not apply to academic research.
It seems that public sentiment is that academics deserve to live in squalor while working for free. Graduate students, who do the bulk of the grunt work of science, already get paid barely above the poverty line. Of course, to the public, these are lazy students with too much free time. In short, the public always wants more from science while paying less. You may argue that it is this way because people don't have a choice in the matter, they must pay taxes. Fair enough, but if science was funded by industry, instead of journals with pay walls, the public would have absolutely no access to research for any amount of money. I, for one, feel that is a much worse outcome.
PRU did offer a private membership, but its annual circulation fee was in the hundreds of dollars. It was 2008, and one of the richest universities in the country wanted to charge a student--who was already enrolled in NNS down the street, hardly any kind of flight risk--the equivalent of 20 hours of labor for the privilege of reading books.
Now PRU has one of the worst academic cultures I've ever experienced or heard of, and I would be glad to learn that the state of public access to academic libraries is not so dire in general. It remains, though, that it is not always so trivially easy to do academic work at university libraries, even if you're already in "the academy".
Piracy of this sort, if it could be kept to those that would not otherwise purchase this article at any profitable price point for the journal, could actually be economically/education-optimal, perhaps?
Also, the last time I checked, copyright had exceptions for academic use. Although I think these are usually limited to copying/reproduction, not the right of publication/distribution, I find these to be distinctions that just aren't warranted in the digital era.