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Nature makes all articles free to view

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Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#41

Post by eru »

jpatokal wrote: post #37
morninj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as a link is shared, each person who learns the URL is potentially a "culprit."

Not if the URL encodes the originator of the link, and all links tied to that user stop working when Nature flips a switch. But regardless of what DRM scheme they choose, it's doomed to fail, all it takes is one person to crack the scheme and liberate the underlying documents. Alternatively, since 100 anointed blogs and media outlets will apparently have the right to download raw PDFs, all it takes is for one of thei…

Don't you have that problem already?

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#42

Post by eru »

542458 wrote: post #35
mkramlich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to it. though I have a similar desire I don't think that's a good argument for justifying it. why? evaluate the following symmetrical situations: > I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... that said, I do think there's a greater net benefit to humanity, and scientific progress will accele…

> I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... That's not a very good comparison, as those are all rival goods, and furthermore have obvious negative externalities (IE are dangerous). I can't think of a non-rival government-funded good (without harmful externalities) that would NOT make sense to to make freely available. Edit: Oh hey, I'm being downvoted for an…

Don't worry about early downvotes. (Also, don't complain about downvotes. That only makes the signal to noise ratio worse.)

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#43

Post by eru »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #34
refurb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any research funded by non-governmental organizations like the Howard Hughes Foundation, Michael J Fox foundation, etc, etc.

A great deal of research funded by such organizations is done in combination with taxpayer funding, particularly with regard to infrastructure. As a cancer researcher I had funding from companies and foundations, but depended on my position in a tax-payer funded research lab to actually do the work.

Also, as charities they probably get tax advantages.

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#44

Post by eru »

mkonecny wrote: post #27
Nicholas_C wrote: post #9

Off topic: Why is this article dated December 2nd? It is still December 1st everywhere in the United States. Perhaps it was published after normal business hours on the 1st, thus defaulting to the 2nd as the official date? Just curious.

The internet doesn't exist solely in the US. It spans GMT -5 through GMT -8. There are countries that are up to 16 hours ahead in time..

> It spans GMT -5 through GMT -8.

Please explain.

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#45

Post by alexqgb »

542458 wrote: post #35
mkramlich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to it. though I have a similar desire I don't think that's a good argument for justifying it. why? evaluate the following symmetrical situations: > I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... that said, I do think there's a greater net benefit to humanity, and scientific progress will accele…

> I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... That's not a very good comparison, as those are all rival goods, and furthermore have obvious negative externalities (IE are dangerous). I can't think of a non-rival government-funded good (without harmful externalities) that would NOT make sense to to make freely available. Edit: Oh hey, I'm being downvoted for an…

Not sure why you're being down-voted. The comparison you were pointing out as being obviously idiotic is, in fact, obviously idiotic.

There's a far better comparison to be made with IP produced by NASA, for instance, which is automatically released directly to the public domain on the grounds that the American public is who commissioned it in the first place (for the rest of the world, it's a gift - you're welcome).

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#46

Post by rkda »

mkramlich wrote: post #33
yupthatsit wrote: post #2

I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to the articles. Anything less is unacceptable (unless Nature wants to pay me back the taxes they owe me).

> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to it. though I have a similar desire I don't think that's a good argument for justifying it. why? evaluate the following symmetrical situations: > I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... that said, I do think there's a greater net benefit to humanity, and scientific progress will accele…

Those are physically objects that cost a lot to replicate. The cost of making digital copies of research documents on the other hand...

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#48

Post by 31reasons »

" Nature's internal costs of publishing run at £20,000–30,000 (US$31,000–47,000) per paper, an extremely high charge to load onto authors or funders rather than spread over subscribers."

What in the digital world would make it so expensive to publish content ?

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#49

Post by xaa »

stephentmcm wrote: post #26
morninj wrote: post #19

Their definition of "free" is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share links with them. For many purposes, articles might be "free" but still hidden from the public.

So how long until someone writes a web crawler that dumps all the links into a searchable public db?

The data needed for searching (titles, abstracts, and other metadata), at least for biology-related articles, is already available in an XML dump from NIH. The public interface is called PubMed, so you can already search for Nature articles, just not within full text.

I have actually tried to do what you are suggesting before, so I could bulk-download PDFs (I have an institutional subscription). The problem is that the URLs are different for every journal, and some have Javascript that makes automated downloading hard. Since there are thousands of journals, it's very tedious to try to invent a generalized solution.

Re: Nature makes all articles free to view

#50

Post by lotyrin »

georgemcbay wrote: post #47

For half a second after I clicked through to ReadCube's site I thought it must be associated with Google because their website's design is the Googleist thing I've ever seen not actually associated with Google. https://www.readcube.com/

The typography and layout, colors all seem pretty generic or even slightly unlike google, but I agree.

It must just be the Open Sans. I didn't realize how much I had it associated with Google's usage.

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