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posted by martyb on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-what-we-paid-for dept.

NASA announced last Tuesday that they would be releasing hundreds of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles on NASA-funded research projects online. The articles are entirely free to access for any member of the public.

The new service is a big deal for the space agency, which has been gathering scientific information on a huge variety of topics since it was established in 1958.

The move comes amid a greater push for scientists to make their research free to the public for others to learn from and to build upon. One computer programmer and research associate at the[sic] Britain's University of Bristol went as far as to call the practice of sealing scientific research behind a journal's paywall "immoral."

Here's hoping that NASA's decision will move the trend for open publishing in the sciences closer to the tipping point.

takyon: At NASA and Space.com. Here is NASA's "PubSpace", which links to this "nasa funded" filtered search.

UPDATE: NASA's free research trove may have broken arms trafficking rules (also at Space News):

Last week, NASA announced that all of its published research would be aggregated into a single portal and published for free. Now, according to Space News, some NASA research has had to be pulled from the Web because the agency fears it might violate export controls.

The research in question represented outputs from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. That program funds ideas like future rover possibilities, aerospace platforms, and even what interstellar flight systems might look like. Derleth is quoted as saying "We've had to remove the studies because of a potential ITAR violation by one of our fellows, so now we're going through and doing all of the ITAR checks to make sure that everything is perfectly legal."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:36PM (#393200)

    The issue isn't just with the scientists. The issue is with the publishers. The publishers reserve the copyright, they don't pay the scientists for their research, and they don't pay peer reviewers for their work either. They just retain monopolies on other people's work and charge a fortune for it. Why do we even need publishers like this.

    That's not to say scientists are entirely without blame. Universities and scientists can do more to either create or choose publishers that don't have these ridiculous practices instead of arbitrarily regarding purely selfish publishers as being more prestigious to publish their work in. Purely selfish publishers are not better sources of information. They're not more prestigious or more reliable. They're bad sources of information and should be regarded as such. Low class. Why scientists regard them as a better source to publish their information in is beyond me. Is it their marketing? If scientists aren't even smart enough to see through marketing just because one source pays more for marketing then they aren't smart enough to be scientists and that alone should raise questions as to their intellect and quality of their work. It's outrageous to think that scientists would be dumb enough to fall for such scams just because of marketing.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:39PM

    by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:39PM (#393241)

    The publishers reserve the copyright, they don't pay the scientists for their research, and they don't pay peer reviewers for their work either. They just retain monopolies on other people's work and charge a fortune for it. Why do we even need publishers like this.

    We don't.

    Universities and scientists can do more to either create or choose publishers that don't have these ridiculous practices instead of arbitrarily regarding purely selfish publishers as being more prestigious to publish their work in.

    Not really. The prestige is in the minds of those who hold the purse strings. Published in Journal of Chromatography brings in more grants than published in soylentnews.org/chemistry_papers/chromatography.

    Is it their marketing?

    Yes, but scientists aren't the customers, they're the product.

    --
    It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:46AM (#393285)

      So the question is who would grant money to scientists for work that's going to be locked up by copyright.

      The government? That should be illegal. Taxpayers already funded and paid for such work and so they should have full free access to it instead of having to pay twice. All research done with taxpayer money should be freely publicly available.