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The New York Times
DRAWING comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan
is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions
of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand
for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just
about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from
acoustics to zymology.
Her
protest against scholarly journals’ paywalls has earned her rock-star
status among advocates for open access, and has shined a light on how
scientific findings that could inform personal and public policy
decisions on matters as consequential as health care, economics and the
environment are often prohibitively expensive to read and impossible to
aggregate and datamine.
“Realistically
only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the
developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen,
a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of
California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. “The
current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it
by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes
the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when
articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.”
Journal
publishers collectively earned $10 billion last year, much of it from
research libraries, which pay annual subscription fees ranging from
$2,000 to $35,000 per title if they don’t buy subscriptions of bundled
titles, which cost millions. The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication...
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