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Should scientific articles be available free online?
- Thread starter #HBC | Mac
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#HBC | Acrostic
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Was discussing this on another forum board a few hours ago, however I feel that the current policy behind science articles are fine. You really have to look at the resources you have that are free and then push your budget around for subscriptions you might be interested in.
National Center for Biotechnology Information (ncbi) allows DNA & amino acid searches to be performed on their database using blastn, blastp, blastx, so on and so forth. If you couple this with free trial versions of programs offered by DNASTAR: Seqman, Megalign, EditSeq, then you can more or less download new sequences discovered by professors and update a compendium if for some reason you're really into collecting and analyzing that sort of stuff.
I am not arguing for the restriction of scientific knowledge. However I feel that making such information free to access will not benefit the community as much as speculated. Many of these articles deal with advanced bodies of knowledge and digging through the materials & methods will often confuse your Average Joe. In this sense, adding a certain price to the service attracts those who are interested in keeping up with such bodies of information which tends to be an acute minority of people who have specialized in that field.
Given the blessings of the internet, it is tempting to argue that all fundamental information should be made public and free on the basis that it can be made public and free and education is always pushed as being a means of advancement for a given society. However even fundamental services such as the New York Times and other newspapers involve a certain cost, despite containing advertisements that should reduce some overhead. I feel that ultimately most academic journals are covered under University coverage policy and the primary people who will keep up to date with such journals are professors and graduate students whose tuition will cover such services. Granted there will always be enthusiasts pining for subscription, but there is a boundary between wanting information and needing it.
Awhile ago I summarized a scientific journal here on how they discovered the interaction between BRCA2 and RAD51. Was it interesting? Yes. Amusing? Yes. Educative? Yes. Practical? No, not really. Much like the news, it is good to keep tabs on current events, but honestly unless you're some Wall Street Stock Market investment capitalist or a stock enthusiast, there is only so much information that is needed to get by in life. The extra information that one grasps in these articles is typically punctuated with advanced technology, large theoreticals, and highly focused results that can't exactly be replicated with the chemistry set we may be keeping at home and have pico- nano- micro- sized outcomes that cannot be understood by others.
In conclusion, it would be nice to have things free to the public. However the current model is fine the way it is right now. Scrounge harder my science mates.
*When I have spare time I could run searches of each major science journal and note how much can and cannot be accessed with a free account. At the moment I'm half in University and half out which makes it difficult to ascertain what can and cannot be viewed with a free subscription.*
National Center for Biotechnology Information (ncbi) allows DNA & amino acid searches to be performed on their database using blastn, blastp, blastx, so on and so forth. If you couple this with free trial versions of programs offered by DNASTAR: Seqman, Megalign, EditSeq, then you can more or less download new sequences discovered by professors and update a compendium if for some reason you're really into collecting and analyzing that sort of stuff.
I am not arguing for the restriction of scientific knowledge. However I feel that making such information free to access will not benefit the community as much as speculated. Many of these articles deal with advanced bodies of knowledge and digging through the materials & methods will often confuse your Average Joe. In this sense, adding a certain price to the service attracts those who are interested in keeping up with such bodies of information which tends to be an acute minority of people who have specialized in that field.
Given the blessings of the internet, it is tempting to argue that all fundamental information should be made public and free on the basis that it can be made public and free and education is always pushed as being a means of advancement for a given society. However even fundamental services such as the New York Times and other newspapers involve a certain cost, despite containing advertisements that should reduce some overhead. I feel that ultimately most academic journals are covered under University coverage policy and the primary people who will keep up to date with such journals are professors and graduate students whose tuition will cover such services. Granted there will always be enthusiasts pining for subscription, but there is a boundary between wanting information and needing it.
Awhile ago I summarized a scientific journal here on how they discovered the interaction between BRCA2 and RAD51. Was it interesting? Yes. Amusing? Yes. Educative? Yes. Practical? No, not really. Much like the news, it is good to keep tabs on current events, but honestly unless you're some Wall Street Stock Market investment capitalist or a stock enthusiast, there is only so much information that is needed to get by in life. The extra information that one grasps in these articles is typically punctuated with advanced technology, large theoreticals, and highly focused results that can't exactly be replicated with the chemistry set we may be keeping at home and have pico- nano- micro- sized outcomes that cannot be understood by others.
In conclusion, it would be nice to have things free to the public. However the current model is fine the way it is right now. Scrounge harder my science mates.
*When I have spare time I could run searches of each major science journal and note how much can and cannot be accessed with a free account. At the moment I'm half in University and half out which makes it difficult to ascertain what can and cannot be viewed with a free subscription.*
MG9
Smash Rookie
Although there is definitely very useful information that could benefit the general public, it is important to also keep in mind that these scientists conduct studies and write research papers as their career and at the end of the day need to be paid for it.
#HBC | Acrostic
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I believe that the cost for performing experiments is covered in the money provided by grants and contracts with private|national organizations. The amount of money that a given researcher earns is reflected in how much money they are able to pull in for the University with respect to current research.
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