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Paywalls for scientific papers burn me up.

The US government pays at least $50,000 in grant money for each paper, but it can't find $5 to make it available for the public in perpetuity, as does the arXiv.org preprint server.

(arXiv.org looks, on the surface, to be a success, but always been functioning on operating budgets that are meant for something else... It's existence has hung on a thread more than once It still struggles to find a sustainable funding model, despite the fact that it costs 1/200-1/1000 as much to make papers available on arXiv.org as does a peer reviewed paper)

Frankly it seems to be an insult to the taxpayer that we pay for research and can't read it/

Completely agree.

$50k/paper is about right. I was surprised to find that even my colleagues didn't know this figure. If only more people were aware of it, perhaps they'd take things more seriously.

The feeling of powerlessness as an individual trapped in the system is only exacerbated by the apparent callousness of those around you.

Things are changing. Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. This does not mean that the actual final version of the paper will be available to everybody though: normally it's the unedited copy, the manuscript as it was submitted to the journal before publication.

This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?

Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications.

I think this rule is specific to the funding agency.

That may apply where you work, but it is not universal. I work at NASA and almost all the papers we generate are (regrettably) published behind paywalls. And the consequences are far worse than having to fork over a few (thousands of) dollars to read them--our scientists are contractually bound NOT to discuss their research during the blackout period prior to publication. It's stifling to research and the community.

Out of curiosity, which journals are these? The NASA scientists I know of that work in astrophysics seem to publish in the normal journals and put their papers on arXiv like everyone else.

The blackout period should be what we call "embargo" and it is a requirement of the publisher; as for the rest: I thought hard sciences had solved the OA problem long time ago with the adoption of arxiv. Why don't you use arxiv?

In the US, you're probably thinking of the NIH's open access policy. The NIH is the largest research agency, with a more than $30 billion dollar budget, so this does cover a lot of US research, but it doesn't cover research from many other agencies.

For much more on the NIH policy, see the links in this article: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih...

There has been a concerted (though not yet successful) effort to extend this type of open access mandate to all US federal agencies with budgets over 100 million. See, for example: http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/index.shtml

With a lot of work, I believe these efforts are likely to be successful. But there is real opposition, not just from some journal publishers, but also from some politicians. See, for example, the efforts by John Conyers (D-Mi) to roll back the NIH open access policy: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#n...

In the UK, all seven UK Research Councils have similar open access policies. The last one to adopt such a policy was the Physical Sciences and Engineering Council, which I believe is the one relevant to computer science research. That policy was adopted in 2009, I believe, and so we're only starting to see the effects now.

Thank you for the very detailed comment. Yes, NIH is what I had in mind. I was under the impression it wasn't going to be just NIH though, as it happens in fact in the UK.

As for the opposition from politicians: isn't this a typical case of lobbies trying to hide behind some representative of choice to fight their battle?

If arXiv started charging 5 bucks for everyone to post there, the only problem would be to make it hassle-free enough. The only people who would be discouraged are the crackpots.

Well, it's kinda like say you have University A and University B receiving funding. University A does some research that B wants to use, so B pays A for access. It's just shuffling taxpayer's money around between two different budgets. It never occurred to them that actual taxpayers - i.e. us - would also want to have access. So there needs to be a way to give that access, yet still preserve the cross-subsidy model between publicly funded institutions.

That's not my experience random walker. A huge number of papers are hidden inside journals, and sites like the ACM. I run into this problem constantly.

You have to look for personal or institute pages. For example, one of my papers is behind the ACM paywall [0], but you can also get the pdf at our institute website [1], where we publish everything [2].

As a last resort, mail to the authors.

[0] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 [1] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald1... [2] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&#...

No, the publishers don't make it availble; you need to look for it on the authors' home pages. Most of the time, if you Google the title with "filetype:pdf", it'll show up.

In the last several years there's been maybe half a dozen times that I failed to find a computer science paper online. I'd estimate that less than 1% of papers in the top conferences are unavailable freely online.

Sorry, that's not my experience. And I read a lot of papers. Most of the time they'll link to a walled site or have no link at all.

Computer science journals are pretty unique in that they let authors get away with that. In any other industry the papers are owned by the publisher, not the author, and putting a link to your own paper on your own website is a copyright violation they will take you to court for (or just blacklist you so you never publish again).

Not true. In astrophysics, at least, all journals I know of let you keep rights to noncommercial publication like putting the paper on arXiv and on your web page.

And even if you have ACM digital library membership, sometimes the paper refered to in the ACM DL is hosted over at Springer or the like and you must pay 30$ or more to access the paper.

I rejoined ACM specifically to get one particular paper only to realize exactly this. The next two papers I looked for the exact same thing happened.

> My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad.

This depends very much on the age of the paper. The older it is, the less likely that it is on the web. If anything it reinforces the profound cyclical amnesia of our industry (never mind academia).

Good reason to have a couple friends at large universities that have institutional subscriptions to journals and the like who can hook you up when needed. Shhh. :x