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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 11 2017, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-read-that-somewhere dept.

Ross Mounce knows that when he shares his research papers online, he may be doing something illegal — if he uploads the final version of a paper that has appeared in a subscription-based journal. Publishers who own copyright on such papers frown on their unauthorized appearance online. Yet when Mounce has uploaded his paywalled articles to ResearchGate, a scholarly social network likened to Facebook for scientists, publishers haven't asked him to take them down. "I'm aware that I might be breaching copyright," says Mounce, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. "But I don't really care."

Mounce isn't alone in his insouciance. The unauthorized sharing of copyrighted research papers is on the rise, say analysts who track the publishing industry. Faced with this problem, science publishers seem to be changing tack in their approach to researchers who breach copyright. Instead of demanding that scientists or network operators take their papers down, some publishers are clubbing together to create systems for legal sharing of articles — called fair sharing — which could also help them to track the extent to which scientists share paywalled articles online.

Sharing information is antithetical to scientific progress.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:13PM (#508329) Journal

    The way we know peer review is done and that it is done well is by trusting editors at reputable journals.

    Yes, trusted people respected by their peers in the field, not some bloodthirsty, money-grubbing corporation! Why do you think this would change with open access?

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 12 2017, @01:21AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday May 12 2017, @01:21AM (#508421) Journal

    I don't think editorial ethics would change; I merely included that statement to reply to the previous post's assertion that we don't know if peer review is done well or at all. Good journals already do it well.

    The rest of my post is about a few potential negative effects of open peer review. Having been on both sides of peer review, I think many people would be less frank and critical if they knew comments would be later posted publicly under their name. But the parent is right -- it would likely also encourage reviewers to take work seriously. The net effect would probably be to improve bad journals and make it somewhat easier to get accepted to good ones. But it could also get more mediocre research published if people are less critical.