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Comment by nagrom | Hacker News Reader

In a lot of cases, you can find the pre-print of the paper on arXiv.org (at least that's the case for my field of nuclear and particle physics.) Copyright imposed by journals is an odd beast, since I think few people subscribe to them directly. Mostly, their money comes from academic institutions and unlike consumer-focused organisations like the RIAA, the journals won't usually go after the little guy.

All that being said, the IoP's previously open-access journal JHEP in which my collaboration typically published our papers was bought by Springer last year. I don't know how their open-access policy has been affected by that.

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I recently published in JHEP and when I tried to view my paper outside the university I was greeted with a pay wall :(. They wanted the going rate of about £30.

All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.

There is indeed something very wrong with that. You pay your taxes which help fund research and then you are charged exorbitant prices for access to the resulting articles. At the time I quit maths there were a smaller uprising among some mathematicians trying to break away from the large old, but unfortunately also still prestigious, journals. "Algebraic and Geometric Topology", an online journal, was formed when the entire group of editors on Elsevier's "Topology and its Applications" resigned as a reaction to Elsevier's increasingly whack pricing policies. Later the same happened for the top journal "Topology", the resignation letter is stil linked at John Baez's site: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf.

Likewise books, lecture notes etc. written by lecturers should be made freely available. You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

All the academics I know who have written books have done so on their own time, either by taking a sabbatical, going down to part time or during evenings and vacations. Sure the university let them use their office and the university library and stuff, but they didn't directly pay them to write their book.

ha I'm a particle physicist by training :) I was going to add to my comment that in my (ex-) field I'm pretty sure that papers were/are freely available on the CERN websites, as well as arXiv.org.

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