ScienceLeaks
Posted by Celia Walter | 21 Jan, 2011This blog exists so that people may anonymously post links to
peer-reviewed scientific papers that been liberated from behind
journal-subscription paywalls. Use comments in the 'Requests for
papers' threads to post requests for papers, and comments in the
'Papers available' threads to post links to the requested pdfs.
http://scienceleaks.blogspot.com/
Introducing Science Leaks
This venture was triggered by the many people complaining that they
couldn't evaluate the 'arseniclife' paper because the journal Science
only allowed access to its abstract, not to the full paper or its
supplementary online materials. In response, Science temporarily
opened access to people wiling to register at their site, but when the
month ends the barrier will go right back up.
This access problem applies to the great majority of scientific papers.
The public pays for the research, but the results are locked behind
journal-subscription paywalls, accessible only to people with personal
subscriptions or affiliated with major research libraries, or to those
willing to pay $20-$40 for access to individual articles.
Most researchers agree that this legacy of the pre-internet days
is morally wrong and unfair to everyone. Those of us who can afford it
pay thousands of dollars to the journals to make our own articles open
access. And many of us post PDFs of our own papers on our personal web
sites. But these aren't easy to find, especially for people not
working in the field.
So I've set up a web site called Science Leaks
(actually a Blogger blog) to serve as a clearing house, providing links
to the papers people want to read. Anyone who's looking for access to
a paper can simply post the paper's information as a comment, and
anyone who knows where a pdf is available can then post the link.
(Once a link is posted I'll remove the request comment, to keep things
tidy.)
This is just a stopgap solution. In the short term, if there's
sufficient interest someone will (I hope) help me to set up a better
site. But the real solution is to change from having subscribers pay
publication costs to having granting agencies pay them, either directly
or as a line item in grant budgets.
From CW : a comment on the above post on ScienceLeaks refered to this Google Getarticles Group
Finding journal articles is often difficult. If you're looking for one, just email the citation to getarticles@googlegroups.com and our team of volunteers will try to find it for you.
If you like finding journal articles, please join the list or follow our RSS feed and reply to people's requests.
http://groups.google.com/group/getarticles