Why does almost every science journals publicatons have to be purchased.
This includes Elsevier, Linkinghub, AAS, and a few others others.
Whats the point of science journals not allowing access to their published articles.
Is this anti access problem a protocol of theirs.

Only LPI is being nice and allowing access.

As the Editor-in-Chief of a (medical) scientific journal that is published by a non-profit professional society but published through a commercial publisher I can tell you that nearly all scientific journals have costs to publish them as well as producing revenue for their Society through advertising AND selling article-specific access to non-subscribers. In addition, the journal is one of the main benefits of membership in the professional society, and is thus a very important recruiting tool to get more society members (which besides doing more good for the professional society's goals, is also another source of revenue for the society). Ergo, there are many reasons why scientific societies and commercial publishers BOTH do not wish to make all content freely available to everyone, at least certainly not for a period of time after publication. If they did this it would reduce the desire of scientists or others to either belong to the Society or to subscribe to the journal. Also, it is true that many people interested in these publications, but clearly not all, have academic affiliations (or even public library affiliations) that give them on-line access. Certainly almost everyone who can make it to a public library can see the PRINT versions of journals like Science, Nature, or the other "majors" as soon as the relevant issues come out.

Running a journal does take substantial work and cost and I believe that it is unreasonable to expect instant access to the entire world for everything that is published free of charge. We might as well wish for free cable TV, free internet service provision, free food, etc. It is true that there is a very active debate about various types of "open access" for scientific publications, varying from some who argue (naively in my personal view) for all-free, all-the-time, instantaneously open (or before) publication, to various systems of delayed open access and use of pre-print servers (like Arxiv). There is plenty on the internet about this debate for those who are interested.

In summary, this is a complex issue of economics for which there is no simple answer for the frustrated non-academic nor a simple solution that will meet all relevant needs over the long term. Sorry.... but hopefully this provides at least some explanation as to why this isn't just an inexplicable dig at amateur scientists.....

Thank you for that thoughtful, detailed, exceedingly lucid answer, DMG. I would have just said "because life isn't free & I got bills to pay- deal with it", but you're a much better person than that!

I accept that the institutions as currently constituted, both professional and commercial, have reasons that make perfect sense in their own terms, but even so it is unacceptable. The institutions must be changed so that they are no longer obstacles to full and immediate public access. There are plenty of very clever people involved; I'm sure a way can and will be found if sufficient pressure is brought to bear. Meanwhile I shall keep on making criminals of sympathetic library staff by wheedling illicit computer printouts out of them. And I am eternally grateful to individuals who from time to time have sent me papers of particular interest, and to authors who regularly post papers on their own websites.

I think that the best approach is that of a few journals that give full access to papers published more than a few years back. This way I feel that the interests of nearly everyone would be protected. By the way, I feel that like for data, papers generated from state-paid research should in any case be made freely accessible after a certain lapse of time.

Two points I'll throw in here. Firstly, not ALL journals charge for access. Just the other day, MC posted a link to an awesome paper about MOC, that's available at marsjournal.org - and all their papers are free to download.

Second point - if you see a paper and you really really want to read it but don't want to pay the $8 or $10 or $15 or $30 for an individual to 'order' it - hunt for the authors homepage - they may have a preprint of either the exact paper, or a similar paper from a different journal for download there, and if not email one of the authors. If you explain that you're just an interested amateur you will probably find they'll be happy to send you a copy.

Last resort- if you have a friend or relative who works in a university etc. - drop THEM an email and they may well be able to grab the PDF for you.

So yeah - most journals do charge - but if you really want to read a paper, chances are if you ask around a bit and do some leg-work - you'll be able to get a copy for nothing, and maybe that's the way it SHOULD be.

I totally agree. Even though I have online library access for several journals, the access is not complete. Many times I have been thwarted by finding an article published just before the "cutoff" even though it was several years back. I'd really like a patent-style system, where after 5 year the article is posted online and freely available.

Trying to find articles from lesser-known journals can be a pain. Having them freely online and freely accessible could only help their readership.

Another possible source for older articles is Google Books. Many of the older (and inaccessible) articles from Current Medicinal Chemistry have been compiled into book form and can be found for free by paging through the combined volume.

I'm a huge fan of an open and freely accessible scientific literature.
(Patent literature, BTW, is freely accessible from the millisecond it publishes.)

The world is moving towards open access after some cutoff as well as various sorts of preprint services, etc. I think 5 or 10 years from today will be quite different than today.

As for state-paid research, things are heading in that direction too in the US. Right now Natl Inst of Health insists on open access deposit of paper after 1 year as do a few other funders. I think that will become more common with most funders. I would point out that a lot of research is not 100% "state-paid". In addition, there is often a need for some incentive for the Principal Investigator and their team to have some initial solo access to the data. After all they are the ones who spent years developing the instruments and the tools to analyze the data. Some of their work thereof was state supported but I bet often a lot was not. Different space missions have adopted different rules and procedures for this. On Cassini imaging, if I understand, they agreed to let the non-calibrated images become public right away but NOT the calibrated images of most use for scientific study. This seems like a fair compromise to me. Why should someone who has put their whole life into creating something be "scooped" by someone else who is acting as a "free rider" -- they put none of the effort into it but get 100% of the benefit. Compromises like either a) period of (often say 1 year) for PI's team solo access to data, followed by public release of those data; or b ) the above -- non-calibrated right away; calibrated only after a solo access period --- seem reasonable to me.

I concur with other thoughts in posts above about ways to obtain papers. Truth be told the journal societies and commercial publishers don't care much about a few PDFs obtained by legal subscribers making their way into the hands of a few colleagues. They worry about wholesale piracy of their collections which is in fact a non-trivial problem especially in some parts of the world.

This saga will go on and it is much covered in the scientific news and press. I would bet that internet searches of "open access scientific papers" or "...scientific data" will show many hits of articles, presentations, lectures, etc.

I kind of understood that but making people have to pay 30$ for the articles
is like making people pay 100$ on ice cream.

If we didnt have to pay more people might use these articles to expand there knowledge and
use that knowledge to discover new things.

Quote removed - Mod

As has been mentioned above, it costs money to produce a journal, and the circulation of these things (compared to other periodicals) is miniscule. The subscription fee is set accordingly (typically a few thousand dollars for an annual institutional sub). I think it's reasonable to be expected to pay for the most recent articles if you don't have institutional access. 'Open access' journals are all well and good, but the costs are offset by the authors themselves, money - a very scarce resource - which is better spent in the lab.

A couple of things. If you are a student there's a very good chance you'll have access to a huge range of online literature through your University network and/or library. And secondly, when I was doing my PhD many years ago there was no such thing as online access - every paper had to be retrieved from library stacks and laboriously photocopied (those journals were heavy and more often than not the copier was out of order). Think yourself lucky

Even after you'd copied it, there was that LONG wait for the mud to dry.

--Greg :-)

This seems like as good a thread as any to post the following: I'm about to embark on a massive cleanout of my office and plan to throw away several file drawers worth of "laboriously photocopied" articles on various topics in planetary geology and geophysics (all of which date to May 2000 or earlier, as I haven't photocopied an article since I finished grad school) as well as several years' worth of Journal of Geophysical Research in hard copy unless someone in the US is interested in me dropping it all into several book boxes and sending it to them via USPS media mail at your cost -- sorry, it's just too heavy to ship overseas. It's hard for me to say how much material there is but a hundred pounds is probably the correct order of magnitude.

--Emily

Wow.

BOY, am I glad I did grad school in the full digital era!

Absolutely! And how the the wind howled in the scriptorium during those bitter winter evenings.

(I'm glad that we've progressed from dead trees to USB memory sticks though...)

The usefulness of such information, as in its potential to spread freely to interested parties, is diminished by charging for it. Not that many libraries have such publications, making getting a copy next to a copy machine or a digital camera as a last resort a lot of legwork. Spending hundreds of dollars to get a dozen articles on line is insanely inefficient. After a year all articles should be freely available, with no waiting time for articles resulting from US taxpayer funded projects. If there were enough interested parties a file sharing system would be a possibility, although such are things that data will never be as widely valued as music.

Don

Don - P2P sharing of some academic\research papers is already happening on a fairly wide scale, the one example I know of where it has reached critical mass is amongst medical students. The medical journals may operate under a different model but the fact that students at schools where direct access to good libraries should mean that they have relatively easy access to the papers in question have taken to indicates to me that the current model is under fairly severe pressure.

The issue is certainly complex - it's easy to say that the information should be freely available but someone has to pay for the time it takes to compile, review and organize it, and then cover the costs of publishing it in a trustworthy manner. Even if the costs of publishing on the 'Net are much smaller than the old dead tree method, there are still some costs. For all its flaws the current system at least distributes those costs to consumers of the end product in some fashion, and as NickF points out if the existing model were to magically disappear then those costs (and the workload) would probably fall to the researchers which is a poor use of their limited resources of time and budget IMO.

I'm hopeful that we'll see some emerging standards, or policies\practices that allow for a transition to a system where at a minimum "mature" research papers become part of a public archive before the trend that's being seen in the medical journal articles becomes more widespread. If that happens then the ensuing battle is likely to make legitimate access harder for those of us who aren't happy to participate in a Napster for Research papers.

I think the whole industry is changing.

Google Scholar (freeware) is already starting to put many of the proprietary search engines (SciFinder - expensive license) into heavy competition.

Free access will drive the market, and reference checking, quickly towards the open access papers.

In my own field of chemistry, finding a recipe in a patent used to be incredibly painful. Now with reaxys (still requires a license), the 1 paragraph patent experimental pops-up instantly in the search engine. Most chemists now prefer using the quickly-available instant patent recipe from reaxys to having to log in to the library, drill through the innumerable menus and dig out the desired literature recipe. Easy access to the patent literature was a total game changer.

I already have a mental list of which journals I can get easily for free, which I need to log in for library access, and which I'll have difficulty getting.

For example, The Journal of Nepal Chemical Society, although relatively obscure, gets my thumbs up for open easy access. If I ever see an article in that journal listed as a relevant reference, that will be my first stop over the more "traditional" chemistry journals.

Never underestimate the activation energy required for those few extra mouse clicks to log in to a library or subscribed website.

I agree with this. While I understand there are costs associated with publication, I believe that the taxpayers have a right to see what is being done with their money, and therefore they should be able to easily and freely access any journal articles based on research funded by taxpayer money. The journals could still make their money via page charges, subscriptions from those who want immediate access or paper copies of the journals, international (non U.S.-taxpayer) customers, etc. The National Research Council of Canada, for example, provides free access to a number of Canadian scientific journals if you access them from a Canadian IP address. Journals like The Mars Journal cut costs by having authors format their papers themselves and only publishing online (with an extra charge if you'd like to order paper copies). A lot of people in the planetary field grumble about wanting nice bound copies of journals to keep on their shelves, but many universities are switching to online-only journal subscriptions, and I certainly prefer to only print the articles I need rather than cluttering up my office with journals!

Starting in the mid 70's, when library photocopiers got decent, I would hit the magazine stacks and copy articles on unmanned space news. Just about everything Jon Eberhart wrote in Science News I made copies of. I lost all these accumulated notebooks in a house fire in 1990. Until the mid 90's, the only way to get decent information from these missions was to WAIT weeks and months for the weekly and monthly science journals and then sift through the years as data was published in the academic journals.

I completely understand the dilemna of academic journals. We live in a world of instant access (not always good - who has the time to just PONDER anymore). We WANT it now! But I think a good compromise is to open these articles to free access after a certain proprietary period. And seriously, if you REAllly want an artcile, usually there is a way to get access. Just takes some searchin and maybe a trip to your university library.

Craig

Sorry you lost those reports. Science News lost a lot when he left. I Think I still have some of those issues.

We are so spoiled getting almost real time pictures from space.

Brian