Talk:2085: arXiv

To be fair, the UI is so bad that that alone is barrier enough for downloading the pdf. :D Also, people might now fight me, because it's really easy if you know what to do. Fabian42 (talk) 19:03, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

It appears this comic may be referencing current events where academics are pushing for more open access publishing and publishers are balking. In particular, see this article in the December 13th issue of Inside Higher Ed. Some key quotes from the article:

The California system wants to fundamentally alter how it pays for journal content from publishers like Elsevier and to accelerate open-access publishing in the process. The UC system wants to do more to make publicly funded research freely accessible to the public.

If an agreement is not reached before the deadline, then as soon as Jan. 1, 2019, the 69,000 faculty members and 238,000 students in the UC system may no longer have access to new articles published in over a thousand Elsevier journals, including Lancet and biology journals published through Cell Press.

It’s certainly the case that major publishers have not embraced these types of agreements,” said MacKie-Mason. “Springer Nature has been more agreeable to contracts of this sort, but many are moving slowly, or actively opposing.”

162.158.106.96 20:43, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

A group of publishing companies are currently taking legal action against websites that share published papers unofficially [1]. I don't know if this applies to the ones mentioned in the comic, but it partly comes down to whether the article is in it's final 'published' format which is copyright of the journal, or an earlier pre-print version not using the publisher's template where the copyright may still be owned by the authors. On the other hand, some publishers have embraced the pre-print model and created their own servers [2]. 162.158.34.178 21:13, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Propably also interesting https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal 162.158.202.52 04:54, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Here is information on how preprints are different than peer-reviewed publications http://holly.witteman.ca/index.php/2017/12/11/getting-access-to-paywalled-papers/

Can someone deduce the field Ponytail is working on?

What fields are they taking about? Which have been most open to sites like arXiv and which have been most reluctant? 108.162.246.161 19:46, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

I know that pretty much every astronomy paper is on arXiv.

arXiv is definitely an astronomer's haven. I don't think even physicists use it as much. And actually, quite hilariously, apparently arXiv recently stopped accepting research notes, and that made AAS Journal that publish these research notes most disappointed [3].