Remapping the scientific landscape: moving from a closed to open science world : Naturejobs Blog

Amyluv's bookmarks 2017-10-17

Summary:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” Those were the words of Aaron Swartz, a young programming prodigy and the creator of Reddit, in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. In 2011, Swartz wrote some code that systematically downloaded millions of academic papers from the JSTOR database onto his computer, which was hidden in a basement closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This act of hacktivism resulted in felony charges, with potential for decades of jail time. Swartz hanged himself in 2013. To some, Swartz’s story embodies the open-science movement, but it is far from clear what his motives for downloading JSOR’s database were, and which, if any, segments of the open science movement Swartz identified with. What is clear, however, is that the data wars are not over. In May, the Economist claimed that “the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”. In this new global economy, science is a resource with owners and beneficiaries. For most academic researchers, peer-reviewed publications remain their most important production output. But the current system of academic publishing is somewhat convoluted. Governments fund a hefty portion of scientific research with taxpayer money (although public research funding is on the decline), but since journals are private entities, taxpayers, and even policymakers, don’t have free access to the final products of research. To complicate the situation further, a website called Sci-Hub has sprung up in recent years, offering the largest database of pirated academic literature...."

Link:

http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/10/16/remapping-the-scientific-landscape-moving-from-a-closed-to-open-science-world/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Amyluv's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.jstor oa.publishing oa.open_science oa.journals oa.funders public oa.piracy oa.scholcomm oa.preprints oa.altmetrics oa.trends oa.conversions oa.copyright oa.sci-hub oa.metrics oa.versions oa.guerrilla

Date tagged:

10/17/2017, 19:57

Date published:

10/17/2017, 09:46