Scientific Papers Want To Be Free

May 12th, 2005 · No Comments

Mad Professor

In an unexpected bout of common sense, dutch academics have agreed to release all their papers directly, thereby surpassing the normal (and expensive scientific journals):

Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.

DAREnet was already launched about a year ago, but for demonstration purposes only. The €2m DARE programme - a joint initiative by all the Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) - harvests all digital available material from local repositories, making it fully searchable. Aside from bibliographical information, the content can be full text, or even audio and video files.

Obviously the scientific journals aren’t happy with this. I for one think it’s about time. In these days of the Internet it makes to sense to stick to archaic distribution methods when you can publish your papers directly. This is good for all of mankind, for now everyone gets access to this information, From the richest student to the poorest farmer. All you need is an internet connection.