That is, in a nutshell, the conclusion of this study. If you have free access to a lot of literature, you are much more likely to click on links and download PDFs (which hopefully means you will read the papers, learn from them, improve your science, and cite them when writing your own manuscripts). If you know that most of the time you will see a "pay $60" page instead, you don't bother clicking anyway.
Also, this mainly applies to the new papers - the older papers are rarely looked at - so there is no real need to keep archives TA for any lengthy periods of time.
Peter Suber comments.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I'm tired of being prevented from reading academic papers because of subscription walls. Both as a student and someone who loves to dig into the history of science, I often cast a wide net when I'm searching for information on a topic I want to know more about. At this very moment, for instance, I'…
You may be aware that PLoS ONE has started making Collections of papers in various areas of research. The older PLoS journals have been making collections for a long time. PLoS ONE is just starting. Last month we put together the first such collection - Stress-Induced Depression and Comorbidities:…
My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general "research methods" class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there's a lot more specialization by subfield),…
For the past week, we've been conducting a little experiment with Cognitive Daily. In the past, we've had several readers complain that we don't include the full post in the RSS feed for CogDaily, so last week we published every post in its entirety on RSS (if you don't know what RSS is, I explain…