[time-nuts] Paywall rant

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Tue Jun 5 07:26:56 UTC 2012


lists at lazygranch.com said:
> Pay-walls on technical journals have to go. The IEEE doesn't pay the author
> for the article. They used to make the author pay a small fee. Anyway, the
> exorbitant fees of technical journals discourages cross-discipline research.
> You can't be a member of every one of these societies.

> The US government papers (Department of Energy for instance) are free on the
> DOE websites, but under a paywall on other government websites. (AKA left
> hand not talking to the right hand.)

This is only somewhat on-topic for time-nuts.

NIH requires that all papers that they fund be available (free) via PubMED.  
I think they give the original journal 6 months or a year of head start.

The IEEE is particularly behind the times.  I assume it's left over from when 
they could get away with it because they only had to jack up the price of 
printed stuff by a small amount.  Some of this may trace back to their 
standards work where they could get away with high prices.

Does anybody have the URL for a good FAQ type article on this area?




-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.






More information about the time-nuts mailing list