AAAS Blocking Access to the Scientific Literature When They Say It Is “Free”

> The only reason the journals can do this is that the governments that fund the research allow them to. A simple change in the rules for government funded research would fix that.

I think that this excellent point is what's missing from most of these discussions: a realisation that most academics, who are under intense pressures to publish, simply don't have the freedom to "vote with their feet" ("vote with their papers", I suppose), and that the change must come from an institutional body. That's why I love open-access policies like the NIH's (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm):

> The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

(Actually, this seems to be weaker than what I remember; is there another law that says that NIH-funded works must appear in some open-access forum, or am I misremembering the import of the law?)

The change is already there in UK: «All articles published by DS/CN are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 CC-BY licence (required for compatibilty with the RCUK mandate, but not offered by many journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences). This means that authors and institutions may also freely republish their work in their own institutional repositories or personal webpages ("Green Open Access").» http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies

Indian government is considering Open Access policy for all publicly funded research: www.medianama.com/2014/07/223-government-open-access-policy/

A second key step that is frequently ignored is that funding has to be provided for publishing in open access (normally it isn't). Publishing budgets are normally very small (if any money is given at all). This often puts quality open access (e.g. PLOS) out of reach.

The last team I was in always wanted to publish open access, but only the Wellcome Trust funded person had a specific budget to pay for it. So we either crammed him on the author list and pretended he contributed significantly (unethical all round) or went non-OA (not what we wanted either).

And this is before we get into whose government paid for what. I was US-funded and working at a British university alongside EU & charity funded researchers. Who has the right to see what? And what if the work was partially funded by a company? Or do you argue that all Europeans have the right to read US-funded work and vice versa? I personally would, but I think many people would disagree if I'd written China instead of the EU.

Also, though I think many people will disagree with this, I'm not sure open access - while ideologically preferable - is a panacea for much at all. I've been publishing OA for >10 years, but in practice it makes virtually no difference to accessibility for professional western researchers. Research papers are perhaps best understood and used as professional communications on method rather than descriptions of truth or the state of the art (as a side note I believe this conflict is where many of the arguments over the quality of the literature arise)*. Professional researchers have access to all the papers they need.

OA really really helps researchers in poor countries. And this is the strongest argument for it, where the impact can really be felt and measured, but this is almost never the argument I see put forward by the tech/gadget communities.

And I note - that is for the authors version of the paper which for older papers many people do not have. I might have it - will look around.

It has been the policy of my lab, and many others, to ignore journal policies on publishing manuscript versions, and post them on our website after the journal publishes the paper. We've never heard of any complaints about this practice, and it results in the papers being available on Google Scholar.

At the very least, you have the moral right to do so. If you're concerned about the legalities, contact your institutions' legal department - this is what they're paid for.

In math, at least, these transfer-of-copyright forms are increasingly allowing by default posting of (final submitted—see juretriglav (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194544)'s link for the importance of this modifier) papers to the arXiv, or even just to one's web page. This seems such an elemental freedom now that it can be hard to remember that it wasn't always the case. I remember, but can no longer find—does anyone know the source?—a post a while back from an academic who asked (probably) Elsevier for permission to post an article on his home page, and was denied it, and who then essentially dared them to sue him for posting it anyway.

Why are authors allowing this?

Whenever I've been published, I've asked to retain copyright and that has been granted -- I'm not sure it's a grant, though, since it's mine to start with. The usual negotiating starting point is a contact from a publisher that automatically claims copyright. I simply delete that clause (and possibly insert "The author retains copyright", so that there's no doubt).

Clearly, that's not happening here and I don't understand why, unless publishers are refusing to publish without being given copyright. In which case, alarm bells should be ringing very loudly.

> got an error saying too many people on the Science Magazine page.

Grab and seed the torrents instead: ftp://libgen.org/repository_torrent/

or donate to 1ENFY4h7ntGZbqwcwpQtXVFJrPnfXRHQLe

LibGen does occasionally get overloaded. Retry later (even only a few minutes) and you're likely to get through.