Paywalled science journals (split from negative forcing from human activity))

[Roamer]

 

The world must move to nationalize scientific journals. The content has already been paid for by us all in our taxes to fund the research!

 

One of the powers of science is that everything is up for debate, and that's hard enough as is.

Nationalisation can destroy this power whenever the people in charge feel like it, and then science would be nothing more then a religion.

[Tim the plumber]

 

The world must move to nationalize scientific journals. The content has already been paid for by us all in our taxes to fund the research!

 

One of the powers of science is that everything is up for debate, and that's hard enough as is.

Nationalisation can destroy this power whenever the people in charge feel like it, and then science would be nothing more then a religion.

I know it sounds dangerous and I fully accept that strong checks against bias or rigging need to be in place and a system of support and investigation would also need to be there to police any threats to it's integrity.

 

But we live in a free world not because everyone is 100% free and nice but because we have police and laws and such which allow us to be safe from the nasties out there.

 

The scientific world is already state funded to an overwhelming degree. It needs to be recognized that this gives the state the responsibility to make the results available for all of us. Also I am not asking for the journals to be the only method of publishing science. I just wish to have free access to results I have already paid for.

[John Cuthber]

Write to the authors and ask for a copy.

I always gave out free copies of papers I had published and I know many other authors do to.

(or, to put it another way, you may already have access to the stuff you paid for- you just don't realise it so you are trying to change the system without understanding it. That sounds rather like climate change)

[swansont]

!

Moderator Note

Note: discussion split from http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/83611-paper-shows-a-high-negitive-forcing-from-human-activity/

 

While I am in general agreement that research results should be widely available, not all science is paid for with government money, and not all of it with one government's money, so I don't see nationalization as a viable course. I think that moving journal publishing to non-profit organizations would move in the right direction.

[imatfaal]

Firstly - from a quick look; the university at which the Authors (of the climate change paper which prompted this discussion) is in Israel so would you have a situation in which only Israeli taxpayers (and I suppose their families) can access the paper? Secondly over 65% of university funding in Israel is non-governmental; so the taxpayer isn't really funding most of it - I am not sure what the figures are for the rest of the world.

 

The system as it stands works pretty well; most researchers in a field have instant electronic access to the vast majority of relevant published works. As John mentioned above academics will often provide copies of papers to interested amateurs or academics outside the university system. Someone needs to pay for the not insubstantial infrastructure required to gather, referee, peer-review, edit, print, distribute, and advertise journals; I, for one, would be very worried if this were left to government.

 

In the last few years we have seen major shifts in govt policy around the world towards bioethics and an increasingly hardline christian influence on research issues - this is bad enough but we do not want our journals subject to the same idiotic interference. We would also quickly see a decline in standards of published papers as jingoism raised its ugly head.

 

There are major publishers already run by very closely monitored and guarded trusts - Guardian and Observer in the UK for instance; this would seem a good road to go down. We must be careful of knocking the established pay-walled model too much though - the alternative at the moment is the open access paradigm; which whilst amazing in theory and when practised correctly, is also open to massive fraud and author exploitation (search on "predatory open access journals")

[CharonY]

As others have mentioned, a single entity the power over scientific discussions is a very bad idea.

However, some grant agencies request publications in open access journals and many journals allow the more or less free use of pre-print versions of the manuscript.

[ajb]

More and more journals are heading towards open access, some make the papers free after a while.