Journal articles/Public Access?

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I've always been curious, why do journal articles seem to be so proprietary? There's like 20 different search engines out there, all that only carry certain journals, and pretty much all require subscriptions to be able to view anything. And if you don't have a subscription, they're way too expensive, on the order of $40 to view an article that may or may not have anything useful to you in it (I honestly don't know of anyone in their right mind who would purchase the articles individually lol). Do people really make that much off of publishing the journal articles themselves?

It just always seemed to me like that sort of information would be far more beneficial for everyone if it was publicly available, maybe even all compiled into a single, comprehensive database so that you wouldn't have to search through all of these different sites! But then again, I don't know much about the actual economic side of publishing, so I'm not sure how viable it would be from a business standpoint. I got curious recently because at my university, we have access to about 10 pretty good search engines for journals. But we're still missing a couple of the other major ones, and because of that I end up missing out on some very good articles out there that have a lot of great information in them. Not to mention, I found that when I was in the workplace I often needed to reference certain research papers for design considerations, only to find that we didn't have access and the company wasn't willing to purchase them.

The so-called "pay wall" which prevent people without University connections from getting ready access to scientific journal articles is scandalous. The amount of money one must pay to either get library access or a copy of a specific article amounts to a copy right on scientific literature. Since much of the research being done is government funded, which means the tax payers are being charged for the research it seems only right that the tax payers should get access either for free or for a low handling cost.

ruveyn

People that decide what projects to fund want to be sure they are spent on quality research. The most successful and thus supposedly the best quality researchers get their work published in journals that have a high standard and especially a good reputation for a long time (standing/prestige).

That means that researchers will want to publish in those journals or else they won't have anything (significant) to publish to begin with. And the journals are of course a business which will charge all usage, they don't care for public good.

However...............

Now if there would pop up a journal which decision makers of funds would recognize as a guarantee for high quality. And enough researchers would bet on it. The journals are thwarted.

You could perhaps sue for freedom of information or to claim your (tax) property. As you mentioned the research paper is financed with tax money.

Some networks are of course more priviligied than others.. *hint*hint*

Too much of human knowledge is locked behind paywalls. A real tragedy. I'm not sure what can be done about it, since it's part of the publish-or-die university system.

My university has a fantastic library with access to probably everything. I was worried about losing that privilege, but I was told that alumni can pay a couple of hundred dollars a year and continue to get certain university privileges such as the library access.
Maybe your uni has similar?

http://phys.org/news/2013-01-world-wide ... ccess.html

That was an interesting article, thanks for posting. I personally think that open access to journal articles could only benefit society. As it stands now I see all of this really amazing research being performed, but then it just gets used to write a pretty little article and stowed away for future researchers to reference at a later date, but the findings never actually achieve any sort of practical or physical use in the real world. And I think that at least part of the reason for that is really some of the only people who have regular access to journal articles are those who are already in academia and conducting their own research.

Really? What became GPS started off as a series of papers on how to make timing consistent with General Theory of Relativity. GPS? It will never be practical. NOT!

Every single technological advance started off as a theoretical paper in a journal read by few.

ruveyn

The problem of access to scientific articles is a serious hurdle for the scientific community, and it has been for some time...

On one hand, the entire *purpose* of publication is to make science available. As one professor of medicine put it to me: "If it's not published, then why call it science?".

On the other hand, the processes of peer review and dissemination are not costless. Someone has to pay those bills.

When studying at the university, I basically had access to almost every English-language scientific article ever published through the standard subscriptions (JSTOR, Elsevier, etc.) And those not included were mostly fringe journals that people probably didn't care about any way. Today, I have to take my chances and hope that the relevant articles are published in Nature or PNAS.

But science faces a very simple problem... It is a public good. And efficiently providing a public good is difficult...

I thoroughly agree, I didn't say that journal articles never achieve practical applications, quite often they do. I meant that I see far too many promising developments in the academic/research sectors that fail to ever gain any sort of notice or traction in the real world, and just get pushed down to the bottom of the barrel.

Hmmm...private corporations charging taxpayers for something they have already purchased...Government is aware of and complicit with this reality...it is an example of corruption in my estimation.

Very simple. Any item of research whose origin is payed totally or in part by tax revenues is released for public access in say, two years or some such number. The only charge that can be tacked onto the access is a reasonable handling fee. All such material should be enabled for hard copy. If the tax payer wants to make his own copy he should be able to. Any use of such articles in subsequent researched should be acknowledged by reference in a bibliography. That way the originator will get proper credit.

ruveyn

Agreed.
Do you think what you describe will ever be a reality?

Its possible. We have to give the journal publishers a time space to make a profit so they can afford to get referees for the papers they have to vet. That costs something and the publishers have to be able to recover the costs and make a profit. But after not to long a time (I propose a two year window) the paper should be readily accessible to all.

Also the publishers should but abstracts or abbreviated descriptions of the -latest- results they published on the internet. That way the general public has some notion of the latest and greatest published result. If a person wants a copy of a particular paper before the publishing window opens, he can order it from the journal at their price. This way Joe Public does not have to subscribe to a journal in the entirety to know what is going on.

ruveyn

I know of a site which offers about 20,000,000 published articles for free. I don't know if it's copyrighted material, so I won't post it until a moderator says it's ok, as I believe linking that site would be a breach of the terms of service. A way to go around it is to PM me, if that's ok with the mods.

You are forgetting about the aliens.