Jimmy Wales Backs UK Government Bid To Free Academic Data

judgecorp writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is helping a UK government bid to make the results of Government funded research available freely online. The move taps into a popular protest at the restrictions which academic publishers place on the availability of research. From the article: 'Almost 11,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of journals owned by the huge academic publisher Elsevier. Subscriptions to the thousands of research journals can cost a big university library millions of pounds each year – costs that have started to bite as budgets are squeezed. Harvard University, frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions, recently encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.'"

Taxed tax

[Weatherlawyer]

You can't get hold of the MetOffice North Atlantic weather chart until it is at least an hour out of date.

Not.

You can go to a German or Dutch site and see it almost as soon as it is prepared but on the British site you have to wait 7 hours.

AND you are not allowed to show it to anyone too neither, unless you have paid AGAIN for a copyright.

Re:But funding is dependent on journal publication

[dkf]

This.

The only true way out of this situation is for there to be established open access journals that are also high impact. Some journals allow the authors to elect to use an open access option for additional cost. Whether the charges are at the right level I really don't know, but it's definitely an option. However, if you're publishing in a traditional high-impact journal that has the open access option, please use it!