In my last post, I mentioned offhand that I could not access a PDF (about an ontology for autonomic license management) without paying a $29 fee to Springer. Though the post was not a direct request for help running around this paywall, I have now received the pdf from 5 different people - several of whom I have never met before.
Clearly, the (micro) community that read that post believe that research articles should be shared in an open-access fashion and that it is both wrong for publishers to charge access fees and right to sabotage the publishers via peer-to-peer exchange of such articles.
I'm wondering if this micro-community (that is you) would feel any differently if the fees paid for such articles went directly to the researchers that produced them rather than to an apparently irrelevant publisher ?
?
(Also, I wonder about the Radiohead style "tip jar" approach. This would allow you to read the article first and then contribute a payment afterwords if you felt that the research in the article was worthy of supporting.)
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