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To me the engineering audience group is a big deal. Regular engineers that do no research per-se might be interested in following research related to their application field to ensure that their developments follow the state of the art. As such they would qualify as more than "casual followers of science" but ain't researchers either.

Two examples come to mind: first developers of distributed databases might want to follow the progress on distributed data-structures such as CRDTs [1]. Apparently Riak developers at Basho are fast at implementing such new theoretical results into their product [2].

[1] http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Marc.Shapiro/papers/RR-695... [2] http://vimeo.com/43903960

I am pretty sure that Basho as an organization is not a subscriber to any pay-walled CS journals. So having such articles as Open Access helps make it discoverable by the engineering community, just by googling, sharing links over social networks, mailing lists or news sites such as HN and reddit.

Similarly developers of (big or small) data analytics tools might want to follow the research on machine learning algorithms so as to implement the state of the art and empirically evaluate it against the previous baselines. As an engineer contributing to the scikit-learn project this is basically my job. I am no researcher myself but I (and the many other scikit-learn developers) try to help transfer the results from academic research to make it available to our users community that reaches out of the traditional academic circles.

Having researchers publish their results in Open Access venues reduces the friction to transfer new results to practical, productionalized implementations (e.g. as open source projects maintained over the years). Open Access is one of the tools to help break the traditional Researcher / Engineering boundary as agile development tools and the devops movement helped break the Developer / Sysadmin boundary. To me Open Access is a fundamental building block of "Agile Science".

> I love how they mention "casual followers of science"

Me too. This is quite beautiful. After I left academia, subscribing to all the journals I used to have access to through my university became economically unfeasible, for obvious reasons.

My alma mater's library has a proxy that you can go through, as if you were sitting right there in the library, and have access to any journal they subscribe to. The trick being you have to be a current student, or alumni student. Alumni membership per year is the equivalent of $40, you can take out books from the library and use that proxy. You should see if your university doesn't have something similar.

This sounds like a great feature. I'm quite sure they don't have anything like this.

I agree with you in spirit, but it's getting harder and harder to follow academic papers, even in areas where I have a degree. In areas like Physics (which fascinates me, though I've only had one year in undergrad) it is VERY hard to follow anything academic.

I still applaud what they're doing. If the research is even remotely funded by taxpayers, then everyone should have access to it. (I consider it partially funded if the school gets NSF grants, or is a non-profit)

> I can't wait for a day when we get a centralized, non-profit, publish/subscribe consumer service for all the papers that ever get published by major research universities (with a good search tool)

You probably know about this already, but if you're interested in anything biomedical in nature, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed interface to the MEDLINE database (also managed by the NLM) is exactly what you describe: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

MEDLINE is a bibliographic database that indexes all of the abstracts going back to the 1960s from literally every major (and almost all minor) journals that do anything even remotely related to biomedicine, and also include a surprising number of physics and CS journals. It features a robust and easy-to-use API, and has since the 1990s. All MEDLINE entries include obvious bibliographic metadata (titles, authors, abstracts, dates, etc.) but also include human-curated index headings, which makes searching way easier. PubMed's interface makes it easy to construct complicated and accurate queries, and the NLM offers online access to their reference librarians, as well.

Furthermore, any published research that is funded by the US National Institutes of Health has to have its full text (including figures, references, etc.) posted to PubMed Central (PMC), which is another online database that the NLM maintains. This is an actual law- if you get money from the NIH, your publications have to end up in PMC following a short embargo period- I think it's about six months post-publication?

All of the PMC content is available free of charge, and it also has an API. It is not a complete full-text mirror of MEDLINE, because not everything in MEDLINE was NIH-funded, but for research going back over the last 7-10 years or so it is often surprisingly complete.

This is one area where biomedicine is way ahead of computer science. As somebody who's worked a lot in both fields, I definitely find myself missing PubMed whenever I need to look for CS literature...

As an aside, the National Library of Medicine is truly one of the hidden jewels of the US government. Its budget is tiny, but it somehow manages to produce fabulous work and performs a vital service for the research community. And almost nobody has heard of it!

> The unavailability of papers, lack of centralized tools, and terrible search interfaces have been incredibly frustrating.

I work at a growing OA Publisher (www.ubiquitypress.com ;) and can completely emphasize - it's one of a bag of problems we're looking at. The search interfaces on individual journals is the standard mixed affair however there are many indexes out there that aggregate articles or just their metadata with decent navigation. Some even specialize in OA: https://www.google.com/search?q=OA+index

> terrible search interfaces

I'm not too unhappy with Google Scholar lately. It seems to have nearly complete coverage of anything that can be found in an online paper archive (both institutional archives and journals' own archives), and a better search interface than those archives do. Via extracting references it even indexes a large amount of older material that's not yet digitized; of course it can't link you PDFs in that case, but it still provides the citation and can return offline papers by title/author/date in search results.

Google Scholar has a reasonable interface, but I find its actual content to be unreliable at best. Downloading references in e.g. BibTeX format, I almost always find significant errors, sometimes in relatively innocuous fields (different formats of a conference name, etc.) but other times in more important fields (authors' names).

It's a great tool, and I use it all the time, but it's certainly no replacement to a properly-managed bibliographic database.

Yeah, I use it purely for discovery, not for bibliographic management. I usually just type in BibTeX data myself rather than importing it from anywhere. Often PDFs have the needed info (authors/title/venue/pages/year) inside the document itself, and if not, you can usually search for the article's title and find the info on the publisher's site. In CS, DBLP also has reasonably good curated bibliographic data, but lower coverage and no full-text search.

So is this a mandate for mandatory deposit on the institutional repository, even if it's not going to be under green OA right away?

If not, most paper will probably not be deposited...