[Open-access] Website up and running!

Mon Feb 27 11:24:50 UTC 2012

Who Needs Access? Academics Need Access!  See this paragraph from Tim
Gowers' latest blog post:
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/elseviers-open-letter-point-by-point-and-some-further-arguments

As for the report they refer to, it again is very hard to interpret
without a lot more information. My experience with Elsevier papers is
this. If an author has taken the trouble to put a paper on the arXiv
or on his or her homepage, then access to that article is easy (no
thanks to Elsevier); otherwise, it is virtually impossible. Probably
if I made more effort, I would be able to work out how to get access
to Elsevier articles via Cambridge University’s subscriptions to their
journals. But if I’m working from home, then I know that that is a
complicated process that involves setting up some kind of account with
our computer services — I tried it once but didn’t follow through to
the end. In practice, if an article is behind the Elsevier paywall, I
don’t read that article. Does that make me an outlier? Am I one of the
7%? Is my situation even part of what the question covers? I haven’t
tried recently, but maybe if I tried to open an Elsevier article from
the computer in my departmental office I would have no trouble. But
all that would say is that Elsevier didn’t have a completely stupid
system for opening articles.