paywalls

See the following -

California's Open Access Bill Encounters A Hurdle, But Gathers Support

Adi Kamdar | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | July 5, 2013

California's landmark open access bill, the California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB 609), has stalled in the State Senate. But take heart—it is far from dead. Read More »

Academic Paywalls Mean Publish And Perish

Sarah Kendzior | Aljazeera | October 2, 2012

On July 19, 2011, Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer and activist, was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles. The articles constituted nearly the entire catalogue of JSTOR, a scholarly research database. Universities that want to use JSTOR are charged as much as $50,000 in annual subscription fees. Read More »

Africa: Breaking Down The Academic Paywalls, In Africa Too

Julie Blussé | allAfrica | April 5, 2013

Across Africa, academics and researchers face financial barriers that keep them from accessing the same knowledge their peers elsewhere in the world can afford. Read More »

After Aaron, Reputation Metrics Startups Aim To Disrupt The Scientific Journal Industry

Richard Price | TechCrunch | February 3, 2013

Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and a second time to read it... Read More »

After Ten Years Of Publishing, What’s Next For PLOS?

David Knutson | PLOS.org | January 24, 2013

At our ten year mark as a publisher of Open Access journals, PLOS announces a year-long series of events to recognize and advance the innovations brought about through the adoption of Open Access publishing. These activities will target both the scientific  community and the public at large. Read More »

Archaeology, Open Access, And The Passing Of Aaron Swartz

Eric Kansa | Digging Digitally | January 13, 2013

I don’t post to this blog as much as I used to, but every once in a while there are some developments in the world of data sharing and scholarly communications that I think worthwhile discussing with respect to archaeology. [...] Read More »

As Predicted, Elsevier's Attempt To Silence Sci-Hub Has Increased Public Awareness Massively

Glynn Moody | TechDirt | March 18, 2016

Last month, Techdirt wrote about the growing interest in Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers -- more than 47,000,000 of them at the time of writing. As Mike noted then, Elsevier's attempt to make the site go away by suing it has inevitably produced a classic Streisand Effect, whereby many more people know about it as a direct result. That was first pointed out by Mike Taylor in a short post, where he listed a few titles that had written about Sci-Hub. This week, David Rosenthal has produced a kind of update, listing many more posts on the subject that have appeared in the last month alone.

Read More »

Ethics, Archaeology, And Open Access

Eric Kansa | ASOR Blog | January 16, 2013

The issue of open access to scholarly works recently gained renewed attention following the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist charged with felony computer and intellectual property crimes involving the mass download of articles from JSTOR. Read More »

Four Things We Can Do Now to Unlock the Cure for Cancer

As a community we are capable of working together to achieve greater things. If we marshal our resources to work together, I believe we can unlock the cure for cancer. This is a rare opportunity. We need to change the models and shift our culture towards collaboration. We can’t just tweak around the edges — patients and their families can’t afford to wait. An alternative system, where all publicly-funded research and data are required to be shared would allow authors to unlock their content and data for re-use with a global audience, and co-operate towards new discoveries and analysis.

Read More »

Hard Evidence: Is Open Access Working?

Ernesto Priego | The Conversation | October 23, 2013

According to Peter Suber open access is academic literature which is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions". Open access delivered by journals is called “gold” open access and open access delivered by repositories is called “green” open access. [...] Read More »

Hiding Your Research Behind A Paywall Is Immoral

Mike Taylor | The Guardian | January 17, 2013

As a scientist your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal's paywall is unacceptable Read More »

How Open Access Scholarship Saves Lives

Nella Letizia | American Libraries | October 22, 2013

Gabriella Reznowski’s son, Xavier, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder in 2012, 14 long years after she first noticed the developmental delays and helped him ride out the seizures caused by the disorder. The most current information that describes it is only found in research journals, which often require subscriptions to access... Read More »

If Someone Hits A Paywall In The Forest, Does It Make A Sound?: The Open Access Button

David Carroll and Joseph McArthur | PLOS Blogs | August 20, 2013

In this guest post, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, medical and pharmacology students at Queen’s University and University College London, respectively, describe their progress on the Open Access Button, a project they hope will help the push towards a more open scholarly publishing system. Read More »

New Bill Helps Expand Public Access To Scientific Knowledge

Adi Kamdar and Corynne McSherry | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | February 15, 2013

Internet users around the world got a Valentine's Day present yesterday in the form of new legislation that requires U.S. government agencies to improve public access to federally funded research. Read More »

Open Access Advocates Protest The FIRST Act

Sal Robinson | Melville House | November 18, 2013

When, in February 2013, the White House issued a directive stating that all larger federal agencies (agencies that spent over $100 million R&D annually) should make the results of any federally funded research available to the public within a year of publication, Open Access advocates cheered. [...] However, a new bill [...] now threatens to reverse the progress made earlier in the year. Read More »