
Closed access means people die - ivoflipse
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/10/23/open-research-reports-what-jenny-and-i-said-and-why-i-am-angry/
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SagelyGuru
Well said! The same situation exists in all subjects and the presented
arguments can be extended to all of them. Perhaps lives are not always lost
but time and money are, for sure. When a large chunk of research money has to
be used up buying access to information, then less research gets done.

So these people who are in business of making money by restricting access to
information that was altruistically provided by someone else are clearly
promoting backwardness and ignorance.

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gldalmaso
I can never agree that publishing of academic papers is closed to subscription
journals.

Isn't it in the best interest os science to have knowledge fully accessible by
anyone?

It's just one of the cases where there are some people making a load of money
out of a completely bogus business model that they manage to continue to lobby
into persevering while there is no logical purpose for it to even exist.

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JoeAltmaier
Not fond of ridiculously-expensive journals. But you can extend any number of
economic-pressure arguments to the conclusion 'X makes people die!' It sounds
like alarmism and its not very convincing.

If you want Bangladesh to have access to journals/articles, start a fund to
pay for it - that would be effective now. Its going to take time to change the
system - you could even say "Advocating politically makes people die!"

~~~
MikeTaylor
Actually, not so much in this case. Open-access publishing is cheaper for
researchers as well as readers -- much, much cheaper. The problem is only
getting from here to there. There is no question than the grass really is
greener on the other side, for everyone except the middle-men currently
growing fat on the Proprietary Academic Publishing Tax.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm not convinced they perform no useful function. At the least, they curate
the collection. Who will do that? For free? Reliably?

Its disingenuous to say "Lets have X for free" without examining the
economics. Why not cars for free? Free movies! I'd like that, Netflix is
expensive.

~~~
MikeTaylor
Joe, no-one is suggesting curation, hosting, indexing and the like should be
done for free. (At least, _I_ a not!) We are suggesting that the result of
this work should be available to all -- including, crucially, the researchers
who did the work and the citizens whose taxes funded it. Increasingly, we are
seeing the author-pays model work well, with publication fees coming out of
project grants.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That seems like a conflict of interest for the publisher. For every article
filtered out, they lose money?

Or pay to submit and risk not being accepted anyway? Kind of a 'poll tax',
where you have to have money to be heard. In principle its shakey either way,
though if the fees were low enough...

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radarsat1
Of course, a lot of things mean people die. Not having information is one
thing. Also, for example, not having money means a country can't afford
healthcare for its citizens. Should we give them all money for free
healthcare? Hey, if you don't, PEOPLE WILL DIE. Can you live with that? Can
you? Maybe you should give all the countries all the money they need, just in
case. Because people could DIE.

I'm not against open access, but this is a bit of a silly argument. Charity is
charity, and it's a good thing, but we shouldn't pretend that it is unethical
_not_ to be charitable, otherwise charity loses its meaning and instead it's
just.. I don't know... something else.

Again, don't misconstrue what i'm saying (I predict it will be miscontrued.) I
agree with the principle that journals charge too much and that the whole
academic publishing system is pretty much a racket. But the argument that DO
THIS OR PEOPLE WILL DIE just makes you sound as bad as right-wing extremist
political rhetoric.

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dustingetz
well, maybe.

[paywall'ed access to information] means people die, IF the said information
would still be discoverable under an open access system.

closed journals fill an important purpose in the ecosystem -- they provide
friction[1] through cost, peer review and filter. it raises the bar for
publication. it also means that without this aggregation and filtering
mechanism, we wouldn't be able to find the important needles in the haystack,
and that means people die.

go figure.

[1] seth godin on friction
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/friction-
sav...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/friction-saves-the-
medium.html)

(i'm an engineer, i'm speculating)

~~~
wladimir
Open journals can just as well be peer-reviewed and filtered as closed ones.
The reviewers generally do not receive money for reviewing, so behind a
paywall or not does not make a difference for the filtering mechanism.

