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Asked by Joe to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 12 Nov 2014.
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Rebecca Ingle answered on 12 Nov 2014:
Open access (where anyone can read the papers for free) is becoming more common but unfortunately, it’s not really the norm. Sadly, all of my papers require expensive journal subscriptions to read them but many journals are in the process of moving towards open access now.
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Laura Schofield answered on 12 Nov 2014:
Morning Joe! As far as I’m aware, you have to pay for most of them (which is really expensive!!) At the moment, journals make their money by selling people, Unis and companies subscriptions to their journal so they aren’t keen on making it all free. However, there is a push towards making them all free access for everyone and charging the scientists to submit papers to them.
Having said that, there are some fabulous free access journals listed on this website http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-journals and another one here http://f1000research.com/articles
I am currently writing my first paper so it isn’t available to read at the moment. Watch this space though! 🙂 -
Matthew Camilleri answered on 12 Nov 2014:
Unfortunately we do not have that much journals on open access at the moment, and the journals that are there tend to be of less quality then subscription journals.
At the moment I have a paper that is being reviewed, so I have not yet published anything.
The easiest way to get papers if you do not have subscriptions tend to be to ask the author directly. He might actually give you other material that would be relevant as well.
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Andrew McKinley answered on 14 Nov 2014:
I think some of my papers are free online, but I’m not certain…
There is a big question hanging over whether papers should be ‘free’ or not. I think we all agree that knowledge should be free, and we’d love it to be so for the common good. However, publishing is expensive and the costs have to be met somewhere. These costs can either be met by the authors (but some may not be able to pay), making them free to read, or they can be met by the readers, meaning that there is no financial barrier to publishing your work.
We will always debate the lesser of two evils; either have science by wealthy research groups which everyone can read, or work by researchers that only the wealthy research groups (those attached to research institutes) can read. There is also a question of bias – if you have paid to publish, then can you really guarantee that the work is high quality? or have the journal only accepted papers by those who have paid the most!
Interestingly, the Royal Society of Chemistry made all of its articles free for almost all African nations to access, in the hope that by providing the knowledge it would help stimulate scientific research, and hence the economies of less developed nations. (some access restrictions were imposed on nations with poor human rights records – the hope being that the promise of ‘free science’ may help to make things better in those nations)
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Comments
Joe commented on :
Congratulations on finishing your paper! And best of luck too you Laura. I look forward to hearing about them.