Comment Actual links (Score 1) 1
The PLOS Biology paper is abstracted at http://journals.plos.org/plosb...
Full paper pdf at http://www.plosbiology.org/art...
Reasonable lay news version at http://news.sciencemag.org/bio...
Scientific paywalls (preventing access to science that was funded entirely or partially by the public purse) are a crime.
We need every available quality mind, rich or poor, on some of our scientific and engineering challenges today.
I agree in principle, but I think you're being a little over the top. Most contributors (rich and poor) to today's scientific and engineering challenges work in an institute that has access to the publications they need. For those who don't, they can access most articles by typing "[ARTICLE NAME] PDF" into Google. This works surprisingly often. If it's not available, just e-mail the author for a copy. Authors want their work read and don't give a shit about the pay wall. The paywall might be there, but it's not really stopping anyone from getting what they need.
Yeah, that's closing in on the real issue. Restricting the readership of an article increases the risk that it won't be read by the one person who sees its critical flaw. That's why pay-to-read is fundamentally anti-scientific, even more so than pay-to-publish. As libraries move more and more to electronic-only subscriptions the monopolistic concentration of power in the hands of a very few companies presents an unjustified threat to our access to knowledge. Secret retractions, where the retracted paper seems never to have existed, are one example of the problem: see RetractionWatch to understand what this represents.
Smart people don't all have someone else paying for their obscenely expensive access to papers which were written on the public dime. OpenAccess should be mandatory for *all* research work done on public or (tax-exempt) charitable funds, and for *all* citations on patents. If you have to pay to read it, then it is not truly public knowledge.
It is unknown it an examiner filed a patent for a "method and device to move the mouse to defraud taxpayers."
What source of information is flawless and can be believed without question? Why do people exhibit good critical thinking skills when it comes to Wikipedia, but swallow wholesale what they get from Encyclopedia Britannica, CNN, Fox News, the Bible, etc?
Perhaps because those others tell them to believe, while Wikipedia tells them *not* to believe, but think critically?
Compare:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.gotquestions.org/Bi...
to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Memory fault - where am I?