Sunday, March 27, 2011

The information is available, if you are a subscriber

There's been a lot of discussion about access to information lately, brought particularly to the forefront by the New York Times's decision to join the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, and other major publications in restricting access to its online articles to those who have paid to subscribe.

Reader of my blog will know that I have long been frustrated by the computer science research community's use of academic research journals to publish their research, journals which charge enormous fees to access the information, even years or decades later, yet which are publishing work that is largely (though not totally) funded by public taxpayer grants. This hurts everyone. However, the publishing industry is very wealthy and can afford Washington lobbyists.

So I was interested to see a recent article discussing an effort by a group of librarians to try to organize an effort to address this problem. It sounded like a promising idea, so I thought I'd link to the article.

But it's only available to subscribers willing to pay for access.

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