Open access Articles.
For students like myself who are not able to afford exorbitantly high subscription rates of scientific journals open access journals is the way to go. The idea that high costs prevent some of the people from accessing published research is forwarded by the proponents of open access policy. On the other hand however the opponents argue that if open access is promoted this might lead to decrease in the quality of research thus published. This could probably be due to many reasons. Journals pay the reviewers to review articles. They are incentive driven. Capital competition is present even in this field. Thus readers must pay for what they read.
I have a different idea. I believe that no one has a birth right to knowledge. And that the benefits of research are in essence derived from access to research results. If the lot is not able to find out what you have done what is the purpose of what you have done in the first place.
At the same time I have a very different idea. I believe that it is our right to have access to all articles published in any of the renowned journals. Articles should be freely accessible to all those researchers who are not able to pay for the subscription. United nation's incentive in this regard has been commendable but still more needs to be done in this regard. While some scientific publications may not have been published in an open access journal, they are, none the less, openly accessible to the public on non-journal websites and can be located by using freely available internet search engines. I feel a need to explore such potential sources of articles and indexing them for the use of poor of our country. I know there will be copyright issues involved in doing so but the again theft of knowledge is not a new phenomenon and history tells us that whenever public has been denied access to a utility they have fought for it. Similar arguments can be applied in this case.
Jonathen Wren has come up with a very bright analysis of the situation in one of the articles published in British Medical Journal (BMJ), recently. In the article the writer has analysed the availability of copyrighted published content over non-journal websites on the internet. He has come up with two important observations. First that there is inverse relationship between the availability of articles and the time since publication. This probably indicates that there is high demand of recently published material. That can be attributed to increasing practice of evidence based medicine all over the world. Second he observes that there is a direct relationship between the impact factor of a journal and availability of its articles over the internet on non-journal websites.
For students like myself who are not able to afford exorbitantly high subscription rates of scientific journals open access journals is the way to go. The idea that high costs prevent some of the people from accessing published research is forwarded by the proponents of open access policy. On the other hand however the opponents argue that if open access is promoted this might lead to decrease in the quality of research thus published. This could probably be due to many reasons. Journals pay the reviewers to review articles. They are incentive driven. Capital competition is present even in this field. Thus readers must pay for what they read.
I have a different idea. I believe that no one has a birth right to knowledge. And that the benefits of research are in essence derived from access to research results. If the lot is not able to find out what you have done what is the purpose of what you have done in the first place.
At the same time I have a very different idea. I believe that it is our right to have access to all articles published in any of the renowned journals. Articles should be freely accessible to all those researchers who are not able to pay for the subscription. United nation's incentive in this regard has been commendable but still more needs to be done in this regard. While some scientific publications may not have been published in an open access journal, they are, none the less, openly accessible to the public on non-journal websites and can be located by using freely available internet search engines. I feel a need to explore such potential sources of articles and indexing them for the use of poor of our country. I know there will be copyright issues involved in doing so but the again theft of knowledge is not a new phenomenon and history tells us that whenever public has been denied access to a utility they have fought for it. Similar arguments can be applied in this case.
Jonathen Wren has come up with a very bright analysis of the situation in one of the articles published in British Medical Journal (BMJ), recently. In the article the writer has analysed the availability of copyrighted published content over non-journal websites on the internet. He has come up with two important observations. First that there is inverse relationship between the availability of articles and the time since publication. This probably indicates that there is high demand of recently published material. That can be attributed to increasing practice of evidence based medicine all over the world. Second he observes that there is a direct relationship between the impact factor of a journal and availability of its articles over the internet on non-journal websites.
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