Original research articles are published by commercial and society journals with a lot of effort and reasonable finances, no doubt. In the end, these organizations earn a decent profit in the first five years of publication and release through internet. Nonetheless, the research organizations also invest a lot of money, effort and intellectual accomplishment for initiating, creating, producing and publication of this new knowledge for their own, country and the world society upliftment. The creators may, however, generate some profit from patents and restrictive transfer of technology. At the same time, a massive research and knowledge is created by a large majority of researchers without much profitability. Such research mostly becomes a basis for development of salable technology, usable basic knowledge, entertainment material, luxury, leisure resources, etc. But the commercial journals would restrict free circulation of this research for at least half-a-century, until the society either forgets about it or treats as obsolete. In this scenario, the society and the original creator of the knowledge suffer the most, for no fault of theirs. Logically, copyright law should have been amended long back to correct this loss of information already generated. What is the view of researchers on this, has never been asked. Please give your views in order to advise the governments on this aspect. Link Poster Strength of ORIGINAL lies in how many times it has been copied.
in most cases, if you are affiliated with an university, you would have access to the articles.
so who exactly do you feel do not have access to the articles or knowledge, and in what capacity?
Brian, thanks for your thoughtful answer. I must admit, that most universities cannot afford to subscribe to all the journals. Students and staff do suffer for this reason, and even the quality of education and research suffers too. In addition, there is a lot of waste of time and resources in unsolicited duplication of research work. I feel that authors of the articles suffer the most, in terms of exposure and citations of their work, despite having originated the research work. In this void, there is a lot of dubious intrusion by unreliable and low-quality 'open-access' journals, which charge heavy fee and are willing publish questionable work or even non-work. In this regard, publishing houses of renowned journals are expected to be more generous, and alternatively supplement their earning more from advertisements than through denial of research work to the end-users.
without necessarily disagreeing with you, a counter proposition may be that resources and platforms like SSRN and RG allow greater dissemination of research. even if the peer reviewed version may not be publicly available, the preprint is very likely. and the preprint is sufficient to advance research. the preprint is also a lot more current than the published version. so, do you feel preprints are ineffective and fail in their purpose?
without necessarily disagreeing with you, a counter proposition may be that resources and platforms like SSRN and RG allow greater dissemination of research. even if the peer reviewed version may not be publicly available, the preprint is very likely. and the preprint is sufficient to advance research. the preprint is also a lot more current than the published version. so, do you feel preprints are ineffective and fail in their purpose?
I wish more people may share their experience with preprints and their practical citability.
i doubt the citability of preprints. but what preprints do do, is they raise awareness. if i identify or come across a good preprint, i would be far more inclined to apply resources to get the published version, if it exists already, because i know its value.
Thanks Brian, i only wish that the tight legal noose on knowledge should be loosened to achieve the ultimate purpose of knowledge, without any one exploiting any one else.
There is little economic justification for the present system of allowing private publishing houses to lock publicly financed knowledge behind a pay wall and keep it there for decades.
Copyrights in relation to literature published in academic journals in most cases are held by corporate publishing houses. Elsevier is an example. Yet the value of these copyrights derives overwhelmingly from the cost of the underlying research - and that cost generally is funded either publicly or by charitable endowment. These last mentioned funding sources also finance most of the cost of the peer review process.
Users of content in academic journals are not limited to persons affiliated with universities. Private scholars, researchers and technologists who lack university affiliation also rely on that knowledge. Moreover, universities are very unevenly financed both globally as well as within countries. For example, few African universities are funded at a level at least equal to the median funding level for universities in Germany. The present copyright system therefore may be criticized also on the basis that it imposes a structural limitation on access to knowledge in less wealthy countries.
I think there is a strong argument for limiting the duration of new copyrights applicable to publications reporting (partly) publicly funded academic research to one year only.