Wider den Nature-Fetischismus! Wissenschaftliche Literatur muss frei sein! – Astrodicticum Simplex

"I have here in the blog publishing practices have often been criticized in the scientific operation (for example here ). She is also highly absurd. Researchers, mostly from public funds paid to do research. Their results must of course be published in a scientific journal. Unlike regular writers or journalists get scientists for their releases but no money, but often still need to pay to publish them ('leading' in the astronomical journals, for example, about $ 100 per page ). Then the article is published and if you want to read it, you have to pay again. A subscription to scientific journals usually costs a few thousand euros and is available usually only in combination with the subscription of other magazines from the same publisher. Such a thing can only be large libraries afford big budget that comes back out of public funds. Thus, the public paid in the worst case equal to three times for a scientific result: First, the researchers who do the work. Then the publisher so that it prints the results. And then once the publisher in order to purchase access to the results back to.  You do not explain why this is absurd actually. Apart from the useless waste of money in an area where far too little money is available anyway, both researchers and the public suffer from this practice. For both, it may be problematic to access scientific publications. Not every university library can afford all the journals subscription. This sometimes leads to the absurd situation that scientists can not read their own publication. And the public is worse off. Articles in magazines can be paid either buy piecemeal (and there usually spend more per item than a normal book in trade costs) if you want to read it online. Or one must hope to be able to read them in a publicly accessible Universitätsbiblithek - but that does not always work and often is just as expensive, if you have the misfortune to live in an area where there is no library and you have to arrive first.  The solution is actually quite simple. Open Access! There are more and more magazines that offer free and unrestricted access to their articles ... The 'impact factor' I have already described a closer look . Essentially, it's about how often a scientific work is properly cited. The more quotes, the more 'important' the article and the more 'important' article is published in a magazine, the more 'important' it is. Although it has long been known that the impact factor is not really a good figure, and very often provides biased results (and can be easily manipulated). Nevertheless, the system remains very popular and leads to absurd consequences. Because much-quoted article not only make a magazine 'important', it is also vice versa. An article is 'important' when it is published in an 'important' magazine.  Among the important of Jounal include in the British science journal 'Nature' and its American counterpart in 'Science'. And because they are so important, there will all publish. An article in Nature counts for a lot in the scientific community and those who manage to accommodate his publications there have a good chance at a good career.  The concept of 'important' magazine has made perhaps a few decades ago sense, when there were only printed journals and not easily accessible databases. If you wanted to know about a subject decision at that time, then could not read everything that was published somewhere in the world to you. You had to be limited to a handful of 'important' journals and hope to find there everything relevant. And who would that his research was read, who just had to make sure to publish it in one of the magazines that are read by all.  But today there are huge online databases capture everything that is published somewhere ... "