Thursday, December 16, 2010

Available papers 2010

Please post as a comment the url where the requested pdf is available.  To facilitate searching please include at least the name of the first author and preferably the full citation information.

Requests for papers 2010

Please provide the citation information for the 2010 paper you want as a comment below (authors, date, title, journal name, journal volume, journal page numbers).  Then watch the 'Papers available 2010' post for a link to be provided.

Available papers 2000-2009

Please post as a comment the url where the requested pdf is available.  To facilitate searching please include at least the name of the first author and preferably the full citation information

Requests for papers 2001-2009

Please provide the citation information for the paper you want as a comment below (authors, date, title, journal name, journal volume, journal page numbers).  Then watch the corresponding 'Papers available' post for a link to be provided.

Available old papers (pre 2000)

Post as a comment the url where the requested pdf is available.  To facilitate searching please include at least the name of the first author and preferably the full citation information.

Requests for old papers (pre 2000)

Provide the citation information for the paper you want as a comment below (authors, date, title, journal name, journal volume, journal page numbers).  Then watch the corresponding 'Papers available' post for a link to be provided.

Introducing Science Leaks

(Cross-posted from RRResearch.)

This venture was triggered by the many people complaining that they couldn't evaluate the 'arseniclife' paper because the journal Science only allowed access to its abstract, not to the full paper or its supplementary online materials.  In response, Science temporarily opened access to people wiling to register at their site, but when the month ends the barrier will go right back up.

This access problem applies to the great majority of scientific papers.  The public pays for the research, but the results are locked behind journal-subscription paywalls, accessible only to people with personal subscriptions or affiliated with major research libraries, or to those willing to pay $20-$40 for access to individual articles.

Most researchers agree that this legacy of the pre-internet days is morally wrong and unfair to everyone.  Those of us who can afford it pay thousands of dollars to the journals to make our own articles open access.  And many of us post PDFs of our own papers on our personal web sites.  But these aren't easy to find, especially for people not working in the field.

So I've set up a web site called Science Leaks (actually a Blogger blog) to serve as a clearing house, providing links to the papers people want to read.  Anyone who's looking for access to a paper can simply post the paper's information as a comment, and anyone who knows where a pdf is available can then post the link.  (Once a link is posted I'll remove the request comment, to keep things tidy.)

This is just a stopgap solution.  In the short term, if there's sufficient interest someone will (I hope) help me to set up a better site.  But the real solution is to change from having subscribers pay publication costs to having granting agencies pay them, either directly or as a line item in grant budgets.