[Taxacom] Paywall our taxonomic tidbit

[John Grehan]

Getting access to papers is less a problem that the pay to play wall that
is being created for authors who do not have the funds. So one one side,
access to papers may be getting better, on the other access to publication
for some appears to be getting worse.

John Grehan

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 7:25 AM, Roderic Page <Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Hi Scott,
>
> If you can get the papers you want through your connections (in other
> words a peer-to-peer network
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_peer-to-peer_processes ) then that
> works for you.
>
> I would argue that reliance on such network, while meeting local needs ("I
> can find my papers, what’s the problem?”), doesn’t work at a global level.
> I work with hundreds of thousands of papers and millions of names, and
> anything which makes papers discoverable and accessible is vital. The
> approach you describe is simply untenable at this scale.
>
> If all you have is peer-to-peer networks then taxonomy will remain
> discipline of small clusters. Maybe that’s all taxonomists want.
>
> But other disciplines, such as biomedicine and genomics realised pretty
> early on that they needed to centralise this, hence we have PubMed and now
> its open access cousin PubMed Central. People doing all sorts of studies
> access these, download content and do extraordinary things with them. I,
> for one, would like taxonomy to be able to do the same. Open access is a
> big part of that vision.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>
> Email:  Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
> Tel:  +44 141 330 4778
> Skype:  rdmpage
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> Citations:  http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=4Z5WABAAAAAJ
> ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roderic_Page
>
>
> On 15 Jan 2016, at 11:08, Scott Thomson <scott.thomson321 at gmail.com
> <mailto:scott.thomson321 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I get the point on the open access argument but think that in general
> whether behind a paywall or not most papers are relatively easy to get. for
> paywalled papers people have numerous options, writing to the author
> obviously is one and that is not difficult, continuing with the Zootaxa
> example in their online preview of papers the corresponding authors contact
> details are included. For myself I always try to immediately respond to
> these. Second is ResearchGate where many authors upload their papers
> irrespective of the paywall issue, if they dont but include the reference
> the clicking of Request full text, button is there. Many libraries also do
> still carry access to papers and the more specialised ones such as our
> field can often be obtained through any University library. Lastly of
> course are list serves like this where i can write a post saying does
> anyone have .... and it will be emailed to me by someone, we tend to share.
>
> For people not in science who want to be, eg the truckie example mentioned
> earlier, well part of wanting to be in any field is learning how to get the
> information you want. They only have to learn how to access the
> information. If the desire is there it does not take long to learn these
> basics.
>
> In all honesty the only papers I have found very difficult to get are
> obscure journals with limited runs, generally older articles.
>
> As to the concern of public funding being used for publishing, I agree
> that in any grant I have seen or been a part of the publishing of the
> findings is an accepted and expected cost within the grant. Considering how
> much these grants are often for, the few hundred in publishing is
> negligible, it is also of benefit to the granting agency as it is a
> demonstration and justification of the spending. Hence in most of my grants
> copies of all publications were submitted to the agency in the final
> reports.
>
> cheers Scott
>
>
> --
> Scott Thomson
> Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo
> Divisão de Vertebrados (Herpetologia)
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