[Open-access] Collections of Libre material

[Douglas Carnall]

>> Especially for scientists access to complete articles and data
>> is compulsory, but I guess that for "laymen" illustrative pictures and
>> abstracts would be sufficient.

>I always get nervous when I see this sort of scientist/layman
>distinction, and I think we should work to eradicate such a boundary
>as much as possible.  (I was a layman myself until a few years ago,
>and would have hated to be fed a watered-down version of research
>while an elite priesthood of scientists got the Real Stuff.

I'd like to reinforce this point. As a translator and editor I very
often deal with unfamiliar topics and need to get up to speed quickly
with the language and jargon typical in a field. It is a major
frustration in my work that the most authoritative work is locked up
behind paywalls. Typically I need to briefly access one key term in a
handful of articles to understand how it is used in the field. As the
prevailing rate for technical translation is around $0.12-0.20/word,
accessing 3 or 4 articles at $30 each to check a single term is
completely unfeasible. But that would be the best way to ensure high
quality. I find paywalls vexing precisely because dumbed down
popularizations are useless to me.

The point more generally is that neither the author nor the publisher
can possibly conceive of all the potential ways that a scholarly work
might be useful when it is freely available. If the scholarly
literature could be treated as one vast linguistic corpus, I am sure
that interesting developments in scientific communication,
terminology, and translation would follow, for example.

D.
-- 
Douglas Carnall
dougie.carnall at gmail.com

http://cabinetbeezer.info

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