[Foundation-l] Black market science

[Tom Morris]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 22:03, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know much about the situation in the humanities though.
>

There's a nice little undercurrent of paper exchange - some legitimate
(asking the author for copies, getting PDFs from author websites,
getting stuff from university pre-print draft repositories), some not
so legitimate (*cough*BitTorrent*cough*) - much as there is in
science, dampened only by the fact that less work in the humanities is
done in journal papers and more in books.

Sadly, compared to science, the embrace of the alternative (open
access, Creative Commons etc.) is very slow. Although the argument for
public access and against oligopoly publishers that is used for open
access science also applies in the humanities, in science it is
strengthened by the desire for open access data that the published
study draw on be also be made available online, while in, say,
philosophy, Plato and Kant are already meet the 'open access'
standard. ;-)

A lot of the slightly older stuff is in JSTOR, which isn't open
access, but the access requirements demanded of subscribing
institutions go in the 'fairly expensive' category rather than the
'brutally fisted with stinging nettles by Satan himself' category.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>

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