Re: science_publishers

[Jocelyn Ireson-Paine <popx@j-paine.org>]

On Thu, 1 Sep 2011, Vaughan Pratt wrote:

> The solution of authors voting with their feet is a very long-term one
> which does not address what's already in the literature but currently
> behind a paywall.
>
> ...
>
> This issue has a particularly large impact on the current hot-button
> topic of global warming, where there are a lot of technically minded
> people without access to the relevant technical journals being cited on
> blogs by people on either side of the debate who do have access.
> Many of you will have noticed that a widespread feeling, particularly
> strong in the US and Australia, has been developing lately that there's
> a conspiracy between governments and scientists to tamper with the free
> market economy by inappropriately steering funding towards alternative
> energy proponents and providers.  Locking influential articles behind a
> paywall has the unfortunate side effect of amplifying this feeling.
>
> For that and other hot-button topics (vaccination and autism, aluminium
> and Alzheimer's, safety of nanotechnology, etc.), a more immediate and
> reliable solution would be welcome, in addition to the solution of
> voting with your feet.
>
Here's my suggestion, inspired by the music-sharing software Napster. Set
up a Web site to which one can upload images of journal pages. Equip it
with optical character-recognition software that in these images, can
identify titles, authors' names, and other bibliographic information, and
that can recognise whether an article is complete or not. Add a program
that can assemble complete articles from partial page sets uploaded by
different people. Call it the "Journal Colimit Construction" site.
Advertise it to fervent believers in open access who are prepared to do
something practical to support their belief: the something practical being
to scan and upload an agreed-on number of pages per week from whatever
journals they can find in their libraries. It might be a good idea to host
the site in a country that doesn't recognise world copyright conventions.

> The problem is not merely academic, it's also a serious social problem.
>
I completely agree.

By the way, the problem once hit my teaching. I used to teach Artificial
Intelligence at Oxford, in the department of Experimental Psychology. I
lectured, ran tutorials, and gave practicals: but was brought in as a
part-timer rather than being employed as a full-time lecturer. (There
wasn't enough AI in the course to warrant full-time employment.) This
mattered, because the department had subscriptions to various academic
bibliographic databases. Like the journals, these were horribly expensive
- except that the department had a free site licence. But _this was only
available to full-timers_. So I was in the odd position of teaching, but
having my adminstrator deny me materials that other staff members were
allowed to use.

> Vaughan Pratt
>
Jocelyn Ireson-Paine
http://www.j-paine.org

Jocelyn's Cartoons:
http://www.j-paine.org/blog/jocelyns_cartoons/


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