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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:56AM
I have an idea. It starts with broad perhaps even world wide implementation of RFC 1945 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945 [ietf.org]
Researchers could publish using that standard or whatever replaces it.
Then someone could create a system that gathers documents published utilizing RFC 1945, parses the full text into individual terms and then ranks their quality based on how many others have cited them using similar terms.
We could call such a ranking system a "page rank" and the tool to crawl this "web" of links, a spider.
Or since it's really just vacuuming up the pages and their links like a pig we could call it a "spider pig!".
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 15 2016, @03:26PM
It starts with broad perhaps even world wide implementation of RFC 1945
Let me know when they get around to actually specifying how 402 Payment Required is supposed to work. Otherwise, how will the infrastructure of organizing peer review be funded?
We could call such a ranking system a "page rank"
You propose a method of ranking articles' impact by the likelihood that following citations randomly will end up on a particular document. Trouble is that Stanford owns a patent on that method and licenses it exclusively to Google, which is part of the multinational Alphabet conglomerate. Any idea when U.S. Patent 6,285,999 [google.com] expires?