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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: 2) by melikamp on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:45PM

    by melikamp (1886) on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:45PM (#508345) Journal

    I am not actually advocating "open review" as described on the wiki, but I do think it's better than a traditional model where we know nothing at all. I actually agree with your points, especially (1), and do believe that making reviews blind may help to reduce the "nice guy" bias. But once the process is done, and the study is accepted, all records must be unsealed and attached to the online publication. And if the study was rejected, all records must be unsealed and handed over to the authors, to use as they please.

    And another thing, all that bias and attrition are indeed very real and nasty, but we don't really know whether they will persist if universities force the faculty to do the review duty at their standard rate. I am trying to imagine myself in their shoes: peer review is written into my job description, I get paid no matter what, I am only one person on a panel of 3 or 4, and my only real concern is that my peers will at some point go over the unsealed review record and see that I personally didn't do anything of value. I think I would just try to be fair and do a decent job, but that's just me :)

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