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The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.
Edit: Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by devlux on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:08AM
The issue of making research available to the masses was solved in 1993 by Tim Berners Lee while at CERN.
He had this really crazy idea, that never really took off but it went something like this.
You create your documents using markup, similar to SGML, but more of a subset really. Then you store them on a server somewhere and you announce their location over in usenet or some other popular place.
What made this system really neat is that you can reference the work of others by including an anchor tag and "linking" to the document you are referencing. This is really handy for researchers especially when you need to make a citation.
Something like this...
According to Tim Lee ".. is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents." http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [info.cern.ch]
As you can see above, the location of your document just needed to be encoded in a special way, they called it a uniform resource locator or URL. It included the protocol, server and document name.
If enough pages linked together, it would form a sort of web pattern. And if enough researchers participated, then this web would be world wide. So the default recommendation was to have a server which identified itself as www.
I think the idea was a brilliant way of opening access to research. Pity it never took off.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:29AM
It did, we just decided to research boobies instead of getting any work done. Thankfully, it's been wildly, wildly, successful.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:46AM
Yo [wikipedia.org], cow clicker [wikipedia.org].
(are today's kids still interested in boobs?)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by devlux on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:01AM
Survey says...
http://www.usatoday.com/videos/life/people/2016/03/10/81575400/ [usatoday.com]
Yes!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:12AM
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 15 2016, @03:59PM
Would you be more interested if it were Cardassian related [cheezburger.com]?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:30AM
What is it with this obsession with... *enhanced* (ie: fake) breasts?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:18AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @06:58AM
plastic is fantastic
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 15 2016, @03:18PM
Cow Clicker is dead [wikipedia.org]; long live Cookie Clicker [dashnet.org].