Richard Smith: A crime against knowledge

Excerpt: "[T]oday...I was speaking to some friends at a medical school in India. I’ve been railing for a decade against the crime of scientific publishers making money from restricting access to scientific research funded with public money, but I felt it inside me as a result of this call. The medical school has problems getting access to research published in journals [and heard about the possibility of obtaining articles from the British Library]....[T]he library does have a document delivery service [which] can deliver almost any article within a few days - for a charge. These articles can be emailed either to a secure IP address or to any email address if encrypted. The charge is £9 plus VAT plus the copyright charge of the publisher, “and,” she said apologetically, “that might be quite high, up to £20 for the big commercial publishers.” The copyright fee can, however, be waived if the institution is something like a medical school. This seemed promising, although galling, to me, but the twist I felt deeply was that the fee would not be waived for even medical schools if the article was going to be emailed...."