The Internet Made Information Free: Now It Has Come For Academic Research

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-08-01

Summary:

"A new study out earlier this month suggests that the world’s largest 'pirate' archive of academic literature, Sci-Hub, may hold as much as 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly publications captured in Crossref’s DOI database. Put another way, more than two-thirds of the world’s major contemporary research output is now available completely for free, despite a vast fraction of it being ordinarily paywalled away from public (and even scholarly) access. What does this latest glimpse into the world of copyright tell us about the future of academic publishing and open access?

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this latest study is the picture it paints of just how far Sci-Hub has come in its mission to make the world’s academic literature freely available to all. That nearly two-thirds of modern scholarly output can be accessed for free in a single place through a centralized uniform interface is truly transformative. Even at the best resourced academic libraries whose online subscriptions span every imaginable journal, there will always be countless obscure and specialty journals that aren’t available and require an email to a librarian requesting a one-time article or issue purchase and sometimes a multiple day turnaround before the PDF is in hand. For those journals an institution has subscriptions for, obtaining the actual PDF of an article of interest can all too easily become an epic saga of searching across multiple database interfaces and wading through complex cumbersome user interfaces that haven’t been modernized since the terminal era, only to find that the article is embargoed until next month or just the text only version is available without figures."

Link:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/07/31/the-internet-made-information-free-now-it-has-come-for-academic-research/#57cb3b0c4640

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.journals oa.guerrilla

Date tagged:

08/01/2017, 14:04

Date published:

08/01/2017, 10:04