Noel Schutt › Open Access

“I frequently need to read journal articles, both for my research in the lab, my own research, and for general interest. The internet is a great help, allowing me to easily find what I need. In fact, allowing scientists to easily share information is why the World Wide Web was created.This makes pay-walls more frustrating.  In the course of my reading, I keep running into a serious problem: not all journals are open access. Some, like Nature and Science, are big enough that they can pretty much do whatever they want, because people will still read them. They charge enough for institutional subscriptions that university libraries can’t always pay for the necessary archive access. This forces professors and students to buy their own individual account. Others, such as ingentaconnect try to charge as much as $213 for a single article! That’s more than a grad student subscription to Nature or Science. This is a problem. Especially since most useful research is funded by the public... The real solution is to require all studies that receive public funding to publish in open access journals. Not having open access to journal articles is a major failure in the purpose of the internet, and specifically the world wide web... Papers behind a pay-wall may as well not exist.”