Royal Society journals are free to access until Oct 27

https://royalsociety.org/journals/

by SQL2219 • 7 years ago

119 16 7 years ago

royalsociety.org

dddddaviddddd2• 7 years ago

Why not be open access always if it can be done for a week?

mxuribe• 7 years ago

For the same reason those with power flaunt it over/in front of those who lack it; because they can.

acollins1331• 7 years ago

Money

mhandley2• 7 years ago

The Royal Society is a non-profit organisation - the income is used mostly to fund research, but also to fund scientific collaboration, and on public policy to try and ensure governments are making decisions that are not completely ignorant of the scientific evidence (of course they can then ignore that evidence).

From the RS financial statements, the income from its publishing side raises about £7.5m per year, and the publishing expenditure costs are about £3.5m per year. So that's around £4m/year that is invested in science that otherwise wouldn't be.

I think many RS fellows would like to see the RS journals become open access all the time. But it would mean that less research could be funded.

Disclaimer: I'm a fellow, but I don't have any insight into future plans on this front.

godzillabrennus• 7 years ago

Put all the back catalogue of research into a zip file and throw it out there via bit torrent.

Let the downloaders become the sharing infrastructure.

imglorp• 7 years ago

Sounds like a different funding model is needed. Retarding or advancing the progress of humanity is the bigger picture here.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 7 years ago

Is £4M of research funding worth more than the impact removing the friction and cost of accessing past articles would have on research (in terms of both cost and speed)?

Symbiote• 7 years ago

The £4m was mostly spent by other scientists, so there's no net benefit to science research spending.

ocschwar• 7 years ago

Because if you're not the customer you're the product. For-profit publishers have abused the reader-pays model into disrepute, but author-pays and sponsor-pays is an awful way to run a journal.

userbinator• 7 years ago

The contents might already be on SciHub and other sites, but I can already see the bandwidth spike they're going to receive from doing this... from those sites wanting to complete their collection, among others.

codeulike• 7 years ago

So they are doing 'Open Access Week', I tried to figure out why, and why this week, which led to me this page https://royalsociety.org/journals/free-content/ and then to here:

http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about

tokai• 7 years ago

This is not open access. The Berlin declaration states it quite clearly. It is about usage rights.[0]

Publishers really love co-opting the OA movement. Scheming up increasingly convoluted colour OA categories. Or deluding the concept with campaigns like this.

[0] https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration

Royal Society journals are free to access until Oct 27

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