> The finalised text says that immediate open access to papers reporting research involving public funds “should be the norm”.
100% this – if tax money fuels it, it belongs to the public, end of story.
Since there are some comments that seem to misunderstand it (clickbait title also btw), this is about "papers reporting publicly funded research".
To this day, I still do not understand what can be a reasonable cause for a paper to cost >$50 just to read it. Besides greed of course. Editors review paper for free, authors pay to get paper published, taxpayers fund the research. What do the journal's staff actually do that worth that kind of money?
All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under. They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism.
This is amazing. Some types of industries should not operate under capitalism and research is probably one of those industries, at least for life-saving research.
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy
Publishing, editing and the prestige assigned to certain journals can't me done completely for free. But it sure has gotten a lot more cheap and convenient to read papers on a computer via arxiv or even a PDF than in a physical printed journal. I do look forward when we have a well run open source SCIence HUB.
What needs to change is the whole “exclusivity” thing. The large publishers have the entire market captive, efffectively forcing exclusivity agreements on authors by means of a rights transfer. This prevents any competition.
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Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission, eh Facebook
Summary of the article by ChatGPT:
There are a lot of smart people who do research and write papers about what they discover. But sometimes, these papers are not easily available for everyone to read. They might be behind a paywall or take a long time to become available. Well, now the European Union (EU) wants to change that. They want all research papers that are paid for with public money to be available right away for everyone to read, without any fees. They also want to support ways of publishing these papers that don't cost money. This could be a big change for how research papers are shared with the world!
A real reason for the student loan crisis is that universities are basically just funding a few publishers.
This is an interesting related letter [0] from Don Knuth in 2003. Don Knuth was part of an editorial board that resigned from a journal out of protest to the pricing policies of the publisher. The letter gives detailed arguments.
[0]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf