In Argentina many local scientific journals are open-access. Public universities and libraries don’t typically have the resources to pay the rates that major publishers are requiring. Therefore, some folks have gotten a little creative with their approach. This interesting information came to us from The Guardian in their article, “Who are the real pirates in academic publishing?”
Call it piracy? Some academics aren’t paid enough to justify the expense and believe if it can’t be hacked they should go around the system. Typically this involves asking colleagues doing a residency in some first world university to obtain it. If that can’t be done, they simply ignore the article.
The articles are published to be used. If some can’t afford to pay, who is losing out? The author, the publisher, and/or the potential user?
Publishers are often characterized as villains but there isn’t one single monocle-wearing publisher making independent and selfish decisions. These are experienced editors, teams of production people, digital experts, and all those in science communication.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
