[Open-access] Collections of Libre material

[Jenny Molloy]

Dear Douglas

Thank you for sharing an excellent example of why NC doesn't work and those
outside academia need access to full articles.
We're planning to compile profiles of people with problems like these to
illustrate the importance of access for everyone, would you be willing to
participate?

I'm not sure what format we'll go for yet but it would involve a short
profile or interview and shouldn't take too much time.

Jenny

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Douglas Carnall
<dougie.carnall at gmail.com>wrote:

> >> 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
>
> Traduction vers l'anglais
> Rédaction de textes en anglais
> Coaching pour présentations en anglais
>
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