Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by return0 on Sunday January 13, 2013 @11:35AM (#5051071)

That is not true. I work in neuroscience and often find myself not having access to "just released" papers. Some of them may appear as preprints months later, if the author bothers to do so. I 've tried to email authors for copies a few times with no response. Even my institution doesn't provide access to all the journals we need (probably the situation is different in the US). There are actually underground websites for searching paywalled journals through proxies.

TBH, historic papers are not that interesting anymore, since the most important ones are cited in more recent research. It's the cutting edge research where it's more annoying. What's more important though is that closed-access is depriving science of the ability to use automated tools for textual analysis. I hope this unfortunate event will motivate more people to realize that having unrestricted access to scientific results is an extremely important issue.

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Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by brittonsmith on Sunday January 13, 2013 @11:50AM (#5051112)

I am in astronomy and it is common practice to post papers on arxiv.org. Because of the need for journal subscriptions and the time it takes for papers to be published, this has become the primary way we keep up with the field. I would say this has revolutionized math and the physical sciences.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the difference between fields is that, at least in astronomy, our journals are supported by the professional societies, like the American Astronomical Society, and not run explicitly for profit.

I should also add that in astronomy, the authors pay a significant amount of to the journal when a paper is published. It is usually in the range of about $100 per page.

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Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by return0 on Sunday January 13, 2013 @12:00PM (#5051146)

Exactly. Arxiv is a revolutionary thing for math, physics, CS etc. Good luck getting life scientists to put their precious papers there. Most don't even pay the open access fee when the journal provides it.

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Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by bendmorris on Sunday January 13, 2013 @11:55AM (#5051131)

Ecology has a mix of for-profit and non-profit journals, but those run by the professional societies aren't always much better. We only recently (within the past few months) won the right to post preprints on arXiv.

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Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by tommorris on Sunday January 13, 2013 @12:03PM (#5051156)

Historic papers are pretty useful for people in the humanities (which is why JSTOR really needs to open up).

And Wikipedia would kind of benefit from the historical stuff.

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Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by kanzure on Sunday January 13, 2013 @01:04PM (#5051302)

    > There are actually underground websites for searching
    > paywalled journals through proxies.

Can you hook a brother up?

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Re:Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron... by Anon84 on Monday January 14, 2013 @08:44AM (#5054578)

Yes, please.

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