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there will be a time when the reference you add to an
Elsevier journal is just as open as the reference you make to PLOS, because we will have learned to reject censorship as a method of economic policy, and all those papers will have been freely copied out for the public to read. Whether that has to happen through rational legal change, mass civil disobedience on Pirate Bay, or throwing the copyright enforcers off a tower in ISIS fashion, we should in any case welcome the day when at last it is no crime to read and share information. We can fund creative endeavors through a marketplace of voluntary contributions without rationing access to their results, provided we set minimum amounts at which each citizen of a given income must pay overall; for that matter, we can completely change an economic system that is meant to compel labor at all costs when in reality the labor is being taken over by machines and economic success is the birthright only of those who own the productive powers of the Earth. And when that day comes ... the edits these editors have made will
312:, caused by escalating prices of academic journals in a time of declining library budgets and increasing demands for expensive electronic access. This crisis is all the more maddening because the massive profits accumulated by Elsevier and its ilk come from extracting money from libraries and universities based on a product that is written for Elsevier largely for free. Scientific and academic research is generated by academics, most of which is paid for by taxpayers in the form of government grants and salaries for academics working for public institutions, and submitted to academic publishers, who pay nothing in exchange above minor administrative costs. Academic journals are not staffed by employees of publishers like Elsevier, but by other academics who as part of their career portfolio edit the journals and
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say "try to" because if you can't do so without violating copyright or other law or
Knowledge (XXG)'s policies, guidelines, and practices (including the common practice of NOT making the "references" section look unnecessarily cluttered), don't do it. The same is true for material that is likely to suffer link-rot in the future. It's less critical for material where the reference contains a link that will likely be stable for years or decades or where it refers to a hardcopy publication that is widely available for free inspection (e.g. in public libraries or by browsing brick-an-mortar bookstores) now and likely to be widely available for free inspection for years to come.
364:... It's patronising, ineffectual". This is simply a way for Elsevier to get a bit of good publicity at essentially no cost to them. Where we differ is in what to do next. Open-access advocates would have Knowledge (XXG) not provide Elsevier with this opportunity for publicity because of our commitment to free knowledge; but I believe Knowledge (XXG) should not heed this suggestion, because while we are committed to open access, our primary obligation is to the readers, even above taking a stand for the open-access movement by rejecting this "gift".
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better. Without this esoteric access, I plainly wouldn't have the sources to write about books from the 60s and 70s, which are caught in a catch-22: their reviews locked away in journals perhaps popular at the time but not economical to index then and not economical to digitize now. These are the types of redlinks that will be very hard to fill unless we increase library access for editors. Godspeed you, TWL. â
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readers of the greatest open access encyclopedia there has ever been. When I cite my open access sources, all readers can use them; when I cite my paywall sources, a few readers will use them and all the rest will click out of them fast (to borrow
Johnbod's phrase above, they'll be "put off"). Am I doing any harm to the open access movement? I don't think so.
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372:. Some of the influential government research-funding agencies are moving in the right direction, although with glacial slowness, by leaning on grantees to avoid locking up behind a corporate paywall outcomes that have been funded by the public purse. On multiple occasions, the editorial boards of Elsevier journals have resigned
511:" of editors who have access to sources while most readers and editors do notâbut that already exists. Different editors read different languages and have access to different materials. Some attend universities with robust print and digital library holdings, while others live in areas with limited library and
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so that it is clear that the source supports the claim, and they should try to include a long enough quote so that, if the work is ever indexed in a public search engine (as many paywalled books and scholarly articles already are) someone can search on the quote and verify the citation is correct. I
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Good piece. As one of the "lucky" editors with a
Elsevier Knowledge (XXG) Library sub I have to say that I have not yet (after some months) managed to access any article I wanted to read (mostly recent medical stuff). All the crown jewels seem to be excluded from the offer - afaik there's no list of
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I definitely agree. But I should add that in addition to getting public and charitable funders to demand public access to the data they pay for - which is truly a no-brainer - we should also look forward to the day when the tyranny of copyright is finally ended. It may seem hard to believe now, but
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Nice op-ed. I like to mention newspaper articles as another issue. They used to be freely accessible, but now more and more newspapers are paywalling them, - at least in
Denmark. Newspaper articles are rarely paid by tax-payers, so shouldn't we expect them to be paywalled when ads cannot pay for them
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The
English Knowledge (XXG) is approaching its five-millionth article. That's five million articles in one language alone that we've created and freely donated to the world. While not every source in every one of those five million is freely available at the click of a mouse, if we didn't scrutinize
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A couple years ago I started to write articles on academic books. At first, I was limited to writing about the ones for which I could find abundant online reviews (the old "if it's not on Google, it doesn't exist"). Now, I've learned the dusty reference tomes and retrospective databases and I know
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In a perverse cycle, the publishers then charge libraries for these publicationsâsometimes twice if they pay separately for a subscription and for access as part of a database. Libraries are charged an "institutional rate" that is far higher than that charged to an individual subscriber; most are
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I love to find sources that are open-access. I cite them all I can. But I don't see why I shouldn't additionally use my library subscription to JSTOR and my TWL subscription to Cairn -- even
Elsevier if I happened to have it. I'm getting information out of those paywall sources and giving it to
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make up some of the collective public resources that will have been built from
Knowledge (XXG). Meanwhile, open access advocates need to address the clear need to create a wall of separation between archivist sites that maintain guaranteed public access to material, regardless of quality, and
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showed that open-access articles are 47% more likely to be cited by
Knowledge (XXG). But the fact remains that not every article can be written solely with open-access materials and not every source cited in an article will be available to every reader or editor. Take the article
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There is an alternative for material that exists in hardcopy: Cite the source in its dead-tree (paper) or dead-dinosaur (microfilm) form, as if you were at a public or university library and were looking at the paper- or microfilm version of the book/journal/newspaper/whatever.
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From my day job as an academic librarian, I can attest that the complaints about
Elsevier by Eisen and other open-access advocates are accurate and well-deserved. There's even a Knowledge (XXG) article about the problems in my field created by publishers like Elsevierâthe
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Good piece. Fortunately, we are starting to get access to necessary databases. There is no reason for people to be out of pocket for their good work in advancing the project, and it's starting to sink in, down in WMF land, that good access makes good articles. (sorry
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What Moody does not mention is that these 45 accounts are part of a much larger program that dates back to 2010, even before TWL was formed; Elsevier is merely the latest database operator to participate. The program provides Knowledge (XXG) editors with access to
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The only difference between this and previous TWL account donations is what almost certainly got the attention of open-access advocates in the first place, the fact that the publisher in question is Elsevier. This Dutch conglomerate is one of the world's largest
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Good op-ed. This controversy is anything but. The best quality sources can sometimes be paywalled--peer reviewed articles among other things usually are. Limiting ourselves to non-paywalled could lead to a drastic reduction of quality for certain articles.
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institutions or library-like online institutions providing information services such as the Knowledge (XXG) Libraryâis satisfying the information needs of the populations they serve. I doubt that Professors Eisen or Murray-Rust would ask libraries at the
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in the name of the open-access movement. While libraries such as these can and should support open access, their primary obligation is to the academic and research needs of their students and faculty, not to the needs of the open access movement.
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that it is "the worldâs largest database of scientific and medical research." Elsevier is providing 45 accounts that offer partial access to the database, which will be given, free of charge, to "top Knowledge (XXG) editors".
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and reference those sources we might not have an article at all on Nyaung-u Sawrahan or any number of other topics. And those articles comprise Knowledge (XXG)'s biggest commitment to the open-access movement: our readers.
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the massive profits as "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation", a statement that still induces rage three years later in those who understand what's been going on in the academic publishing industry.
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The open-access movement has made great strides in the area of academic journals. Academics are abandoning journals by for-profit publishers like Elsevier in favor of open-access journals and repositories like
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Editor's note: Gamaliel plays a very small role at the TWL, coordinating access to one of the many available databases, but he was not contacted by them for this editorial, which is entirely his own opinion.
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having an open bar, or why the latter is far, far more troubling than the former, then you're either profoundly stupid or being extremely disingenuous in blind, fawning support of "your side".
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Good point. NPR is mostly available, as is much of C-Span. I subscribe to three paywalls NYT, the New Yorker and WP, but miss the WSJ and FT. Couldn't, shouldn't, read that many papers.
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Thanks for writing this. I think you make a great point about how open access advocates aren't demanding that university libraries stop subscribing to important journals.
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academic libraries that are part of the same class of institutions that generate most of this research in the first place. For their role, which is barely more than
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and trolls. If you are currently editing, are not currently blocked, and your account isn't brand new, you'll probably be able to get access yourself. (
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If we cite a "donated" resource, whether it's an account to a pay-walled publisher or a physical book, we may be failing in our duty of neutrality.
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A similar obligation exists for the Knowledge (XXG) Library: to help editors write the best articles they can using the best sources they can. As
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882:. It's their massive, premier sciences/medicine collection. Can you give me an example of a source that wasn't accessible through it? Cheers,
504:, and none of which appear to be available digitally. Most readers will not have access to these books, let alone the ability to read Burmese.
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for use in researching, writing, citing, and verifying Knowledge (XXG) articles. The bit about "top Knowledge (XXG) editors" is puffery from
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There's a difference between choosing to stop submitting to particular journals and demanding that your library stop subscribing to them!
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Well I don't. I've forwarded you by email a message from them when I queried on one item via Nikkimaria, and I can't for example access
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access. Programs like TWL don't create those disparities. They help alleviate them by providing some editors with needed sources.
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No access is no answer to closed access: On Knowledge (XXG)'s commitment to open access and its obligations to readers and editors.
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publishers who should call attention to the best papers without being paid anything for the privilege. The alternative is
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Access to academic journals has become a significant part of the open-access movement, such as the case of activist
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Well, not really. I haven't tried that often, but when I do try I don't get access, so that rather puts me off.
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Corporate profit model collides with taxpayer-funded knowledge: a continuous multi-billion-dollar windfall.
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843:, sounds like the first legitimate critique I've heard of the Elsevier deal. Can you elaborate? (FWIW I
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729:: "In the United States no good newspaper is not paywalled"âtry the US edition of the Guardian.
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a profit margin of a whopping 37%. In 2012, Elsevier's director of global academic relations
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If you don't acknowledge the difference between a public convention center offering beer and
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and controls access to some two thousand academic journals, including the prestigious
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If we do not cite the best source, pay-walled or not, we do our readers a disservice.
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editorials etc, which I think anyone can. I also can't get textbook chapters like
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If we cite pay-walled sources we risk helping perpetuate the pay-walls.
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goes as far as dubbing this with the ridiculous moniker of "
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In the United States no good newspaper is not paywalled.
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The primary obligation of librariesâwhether traditional
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that contains some 2,500 journals and 26,000 e-books.
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When quoting limited-access material, editors should
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Academic journal publishing reform#Schekman boycott
619:If your comment has not appeared here, you can try
427:not to provide access to Elsevier journals like
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1160:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2015-09
408:St John's College Old Library, Cambridge
18:Knowledge (XXG):Knowledge (XXG) Signpost
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1107:putting together the next issue
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615:add the page to your watchlist
316:the articles as volunteers.
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973:Mothers Against Drunk Driving
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845:blogged about this last week
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612:. To follow comments,
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45:â Back to Contents
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498:Nyaung-u Sawrahan
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416:bricks-and-mortar
354:Peter Murray-Rust
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57:16 September 2015
50:View Latest Issue
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