EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry - with the same chilling effect on the spread of innovation. [1]<p>It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community embraces this with gusto. The parallel with OSS is interesting - somewhat in the same spirit as the programming community embraced open source, I think the benefit of open access is that the researcher evaluates the tradeoff between &#x27;capturing value&#x27; vs &#x27;making a difference&#x27;, without worrying about the external factor of &#x27;what does this external entity, which provided very little in terms of constructive input when the work was being done, allow me to do (with regards to publishing openly)?&#x27;.<p>But then again, I could be completely wrong, especially in domains like the physical sciences where I don&#x27;t know how the incentives align. I hope it works out well, and that soon this is the just the norm in all countries.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogoftheisotopes.blogspot.in&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;elsevier-backlash.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogoftheisotopes.blogspot.in&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;elsevier-backla...</a>