ACS now has abstracts available to non-subscribers!

Why should you see free access? Does the daily paper appear in your yard if you don't subscribe? Does your cable or Internet provider not require a check every month or so? Does Aspen Research give away its reports for free?

require a check

Surely the daily paper, cable and ISP service is _not_ in any direct way supported by government dollars. I doubt Aspen Research figures into the equation, here.

IMHO, if someone wants to make an argument either way, they need to show that a properence of the reports published by the ACS are privately supported or government (Fed. or State) supported. Restricted or open access arguments follow the results.

Pretty simple stuff, folks. Complications are added by thieves/parocites/fools. . . ..Mark (More Condi Rice anyone? Hot sauce? :-) . .

Could you provide the link the asbtracts are available? ACS is very unfriendly to non-suscribers, especialy they don't even allow searching their articles (not even titles). Free search is limited to only last four years of publications. Why don't they think the free searching would *increase* their readership? Naturally an interested vistor after locating the article would try obtain the paper either by purchasing (too expensive $ 25) or from the library. Other competing journals such as Angew. Chem. do allow the visitor to search and read the abstracts. Why ACS behaves monopolistically? Is it because the publishers are more interested in $ than in education.

Not in my lifetime for sure - I've got over 20 years on you ;( Frank

And my compensation when I review a paper for them is ...? I'm not going to rehash as the arguments on either side. You are well aware of them. PNAS is agressively moving towards free access, and the issue is on the table for all other publishers. The trend is clear, it's just a matter of timing.

John

My biggest complaint has been that since the abstracts are unavailable, I've been very risk-averse about ordering an article for $30+ unless I am very sure that it is what I want. The title is hardly ever enough to really inform you of the nature of the work. Maybe they thought that they were making more money from people ordering just based on the title, but now have realized that that is not the case. I'm not sure. Again, it is a step in the right direction.

John

The government may support the research. It doesn't pay for publishing, except in its own journals, AFAIK.

The problem with that approach is that most work is now international. As Americans, we may feel we have an entitlement to research supported by American tax dollars, but we cannot have the same entitlement to work supported by French tax dollars, or Indian tax dollars or ... Trying to control the resulting patchwork would be a nightmare.

Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences is moving towards open access by charging the authors. That solves the issue immediately. I suspect (or probably more correctly, I naively hope) that if this approach were taken across the board, there might be an increase in the quality of the publications, as publishing papers that are of little importance would get to be an expensive proposition. "Rheological Characterization of Polyolefins, Part LXXII"

John

Neither is scientific publishing.

Steve Turner

Not quite. Remember page charges, and think about why they are allowed.

josh halpern

several daily papers have FREE softcopy on the Internet.

**>Glad to see that they are catching up to the rest of the publishing *>world! The next question is: will I see free access in my lifetime? *>(I'm currently 43. The early line from Vegas is 10-1 against.) *> *>John *> * *Why should you see free access? Does the daily paper appear in your yard if *you don't subscribe? Does your cable or Internet provider not require a check *every month or so? Does Aspen Research give away its reports for free?

An editorial in Angewandte Chemie at the end of last year had a good discussion on the topic of open access to scientific journals. It's a good read regardless of your standpoint in this issue. I even think it's open access :-)

P. Gölitz, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 44 (2005) 4-7.

text) ("abstract" page)

Have a nice day, Mikael J.

Yep, and that's their choice. It's also their choice if they choose not to have free access. Requiring them to allow free access, or berating them if they don't, is wrong.

I would assume you're not looking forward to Rocky VI either ...

Page charges were instituted by many journals 30 or 40 years ago. It was widely disliked by authors, especially (but not only) when they had to pay the charges out of their pockets or out of limited lab funds. It didn't take long for the journals to drop it. There was discussion of this more recently, and the charges would have to be several hundred dollars per page to make up for the income lost from journal subscriptions.

Who is charging page charges these days? As I just said in another posting, it is an old idea that didn't turn out well when it was tried. And, do government grants cover publictaion costs?

In my mind, what would make sense is for CA to make available conversion from CA compound number conversion into standard names. Then, they could make abstract numbers available at a low cost with actual abstracts available at a reasonable cost payable with a credit card.

Bill

posting, it is an old idea that didn't turn out well when

Publications, and meetings, IIRC. . . ..Mark . .

Yes

josh halpern