Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

This is for a very narrow definition of maths. Also it's rare that a paper is completely comprehensive. Some proofs are usually defered to other papers.

First I would like to show the fallacy of your reasoning: we're discussing the unreasonableness of the current price of APCs for open access publications, and you are justifying its reasonableness by giving the current prices.

Now I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Nobody is denying that publication has a cost. But take all the money that universities around the world spend in subscriptions, add all the money that is paid in APCs. With that kind of money you could laaaaargely support many publishing platforms and professional librarians and technicians to manage, improve and maintains articles metadata and the platforms.

The remaining amount of money (which would be most of it in my opinion) could be used to actually fund research and higher education.

But let's be even wilder! Consider that, rather than being owned by a publisher who's main job is making money, each journal is owned by its editorial board (i.e., the scientific committee composed by the researchers who actually do the peer reviewing work for this journal as part of their researcher work (they're not paid for this task in addition to their salaries)). Now with relatively cheap¹ technical platforms (such as arXiv, HAL, revues.org, easychair, sciencesconf, SciELO, …), we would have everything we have now² for almost free. And publishers could act as contractor (and would be in competition against each other for quality and price) when we want professional editing and paper prints of some journal volumes. If in addition to that the papers use free content copyleft licenses such as CC-BY-SA, then when any university choose to spend a little money to get a professional edition of some papers everyone benefits.

¹ These platforms are not that cheap in fact, but they cost nothing compared to the current cumulated spending in subscriptions etc.

² Many publications todays are actually not professionally edited, publishers actually take the camera-ready version of the authors and just put the PDF online. So their job mainly consist in hosting PDFs, yet they get a freaking awful lot of money for that.

AFAIU the use needn't pass any of the tests.

Fair Use is an affirmative defense. That is: it's not a right to use copyrighted works, but, in the event infringement is alleged, it may be invoked as a defense.

Specifically the language of US statute is "the factors to be considered shall include". Which can be read as also allowing other considerations. Though I don't know offhand of specific legal gloss or caselaw demonstrating otherwise. The Wikipedia article you cite has that specific claim flagged as "citation required" at this time.

I worked with a fantastic implantology startup (http://bioimplant.at) up until a few months ago, and it was illuminating to discover just how much of the implant industry is a racket.

Most surprising of all was the casual ignorance of the majority of 'dentists'/'implantologists' on the DentalTown implants forum. I'd certainly never want any of them in the vicinity of my mouth.

As for these institutions trumpeting their devotion to the 'dissemination of new knowledge', get in touch with Dr Pirker at BioImplant, and ask for his point of view on the subject...

I find that the practice of reading any given stream of data without some directed filtering on my own part is relatively low.

But once you do find a specific topic of interest, the ability to go directly to high-grade, quality sources on that topic is hugely useful.

I've been pursuing just such a research project over the past several years, and tools such as /r/scholar and Library Genesis (as well as traditional bookstores and libraries) are phenomenally useful.

The problem I increasingly run into in the online world is that first-order sources -- social media, blogs, and for the most part even news media, are of exceeding poor quality. They fail to cite sources, they're often simply memetic rip-offs, or copy highlights from corporate press releases. I highlighted an instance just today concerning a biomethane bus story out of the UK -- as with many renewable energy stories, it was lacking in specific quantification and contextual information, which I've supplied: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg...

Worth noting as well: the source of the additional information was 1) Wikipedia (for population measures), my own familiarity with human dietary baselines, the International Energy Agency, and a UK government office which posts its data reports online.

The ability to dig into specific academic articles is huge though. I'm also finding a renewed love of books -- there's something about going through a work that someone spent a few years assembling and citing (books lacking indices, bibliographies, and footnotes or end-notes are not worth having).

What's killer now is to be able to read a book, see a point of interest, follow the citation, and then call up the specific paper or report there and then to see what exactly it says. This both hugely increases the information available to the researcher, and reduces the friction of verifying citations. Often you'll find that there are foundational works, otherwise not generally available, which are very useful.

Those published prior to ~1920 are very frequently freely available. Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive have wide-ranging collections, but there are other organizations which have their own assemblages of works (including, ironically given my own views on the subjects, many free-market fundamentalist and libertarian organizations).

Among my bigger frustrations is actually managing all of this -- tools to bookmark, reference, cite, annotate, call-up, etc., electronic media are greatly wanting.