

Why is Science Behind a Paywall? - tsenkov
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-paywall

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PaulHoule
There's a pretty simple explanation.

It's called tenure. As a result of tenure, the official policy of the
university is "Aproi moi le deluge"

One symptom of this is continuous handwringing about problems that never go
away. If you look at CACM, for instance, they've been running pretty much the
same article about "Why don't women major in computer science?" every two
months for every twenty years. Physics Today, on the other hand, runs an
article about every six months about the terrible academic job prospects for
physics PhD's. (The last 10 Einsteins we created all went to work for Goldman
Sacks)

Because a professor doesn't personally have skin in any game (he can't find
himself on the street) he's really got no reason to address problems that
affect his field or academia as a whole.

I know some people who talked with Don Knuth about libraries and open access
and Knuth displayed his ignorance: "there's no problem, we don't need
libraries, I just read all the journals for free on my computer." He was
ignorant of the facts that: (1) the library at his school cuts a huge check to
Elsevier every year, and (2) people outside the ivory walls don't share his
privilege.

It's that kind of thinking that keeps science behind a paywall.

~~~
bnegreve
_Après moi le déluge_

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mathattack
"One game changer would be governments mandating that publicly financed
research be made publicly available. Every year the United States government
provides over $60 billion in public grants for scientific research. In 2008,
Congress mandated (over furious opposition from private publishers) that all
research funded through the National Institute of Health, which accounts for
50% of government funding of science, be made publicly available within a
year. Extending this requirement to all other research financed by the
government would go a long way for OA publishing. This is true of similar
efforts by the British and Canadian governments, which are in the midst of
such steps."

This is the solution. As taxpayers we say the research must be open. If you
research based on our grant money, it must be open. If you are a public
school, it must be open. If you are on public land, it must be open. If you
want non-profit status, it must be open. If you want to it be closed, then you
must be a self-funded for-profit institution. (Sometimes we call these things
businesses)

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mpyne
Very informative article, even if it explains things that most of us here
already realize, it's very useful to point others to with less background on
"open science".

