Yeah, much as I'm not a fan of pure capitalism, this one can't really be laid at its feet. It's a result of abuse of a government-created regulation by private industries; it owes as much to government intervention as it does to the lack thereof, and thus occupies a weird limbo where it can't be ascribed to any particular economic philosophy except greed.
Better policymaking would really help out in situations like this, but the issue is that this is a politically rather unessential thing - sure, you're losing a lot of intellectual potential and a lot of idealists are bruised, but there isn't something tangibly disastrous besides a few scholars going poor. Thus, it's things like this that shoehorn in change as said idealists take action.
Hope none of that stuff is math, because once a math paper is published, that stuff should basically be considered free for universal consumption. This is one of the reasons why mathematicians are terrible at citations, for example.
Hurm...
There might be a few in there. I've almost finished getting my copy of the archives, so I'll take a look at that when it's done.
And if you copy something at the university library, the copy machine is probably going to be overpriced too. You just can't win.
Not all of us have access to good universities that have subscriptions to databases like this. Not all of us live in that candy-coated world of yours, and without a nearby institute with a subscription (and enough money to study at said university), it's prohibitively expensive.
In my experience, I think most of the money that academic publishers make now is from universities buying student-wide subscriptions. At least any American university worth its salt will have unlimited access to dozens of scientific journal storehouses (JSTOR especially, useless as they are), the cost of which is spread out into tuition prices. But even so, once you find how much the stuff costs to people not enrolled in college, it becomes clear that any ordinary person trying to have access to the same information would have to spend thousands of dollars a year.
Agreed. If this information were to be open, it would go a very long way indeed toward promoting both a higher standard of scientific knowledge, and higher awareness on part of a nation's citizens.
.... nice but its not like articles from before 1927 will have loads of stuff relevant to today's concerns. You might find it more interesting to google "open access journals" or check the freebies that ppv journals do offer. Normally they give some free articles every month. Finally, if you find an article you want to read but is not for free anywhere, you could mail the author and ask him or her for a copy
There's a lot of work that goes in between submission and eventual publication, which is part of the reason it often takes up to two-three years for a single paper to be approved and published. It's pretty unlikely, if not impossible, that you'll get free access directly from the author.
This has some value to it beyond the literal, in my opinion. It's a sign that people are willing to make change in such an area - and free potentially valuable information in the process. It's just a matter of time before a larger payload of more recent articles is leaked.
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Topic: Huge academic database leaked by Maxwell on TPB - potential losses in billions (Read 2703 times)