[open-science] Request from SPARC re: journal workarounds

Thu May 29 21:19:33 UTC 2014

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 12:42 PM, Graham Steel <steelgraham at hotmail.com>wrote:

> We have received some requests to get in writing the lengths that these
> companies/individuals go to in order to get information because they can't
> afford to purchase the articles and how it has, in essence, created a
> 'black market for scholarly journals'.  Graham -- does this seem like
> something you would you be able to do?'

There are websites with populations the size of small cities that solely
exist to help others access academic content (>50,000 users). The most
public are in China but the users aren't all from China of course. I
suspect that the majority of the innovation broadly attributed to content
monopolies and technology patent monopolies are instead actually the result
of sharing; it's certainly one of the only few explanations to describe the
huge amounts of activity observed in the free and open source software
worlds.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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