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Early in the pandemic, as the first case reports of a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, China, emerged in the pages of scientific publications, a growing number of academic publishers decided to make their coronavirus articles free. The gesture of dropping paywalls was grand, but over the ensuing months, it lost the spotlight to another trend. As the pandemic progressed, more and more scientists decided to simply upload rough draft versions of their papers to the web. Those so-called preprints are free for anyone to read, and always have been. It has certainly helped speed the fight against the coronavirus. But preprints are not posted in every field of science and medicine, and there are many papers about other life-threatening diseases published every day that sit behind paywalls.
There’s a movement afoot to change that: to make research more open, and get to successful treatments quicker. The question is, will that movement succeed? And how has the pandemic changed the trajectory of this centuries-old institution of academic publishing? In this segment, guest-host Roxanne Khamsi speaks with Bloomberg columnist Justin Fox about the long history and many business models of the academic publishing industry. Plus, she interviews Chordoma Foundation co-founder and executive director Josh Sommer about his views on scientific paywalls and access issues, as a cancer survivor and patient advocate.
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CONTENT WARNING: self-harm/suicide
Early in the pandemic, as the first case reports of a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, China, emerged in the pages of scientific publications, a growing number of academic publishers decided to make their coronavirus articles free. The gesture of dropping paywalls was grand, but over the ensuing months, it lost the spotlight to another trend. As the pandemic progressed, more and more scientists decided to simply upload rough draft versions of their papers to the web. Those so-called preprints are free for anyone to read, and always have been. It has certainly helped speed the fight against the coronavirus. But preprints are not posted in every field of science and medicine, and there are many papers about other life-threatening diseases published every day that sit behind paywalls.
There’s a movement afoot to change that: to make research more open, and get to successful treatments quicker. The question is, will that movement succeed? And how has the pandemic changed the trajectory of this centuries-old institution of academic publishing? In this segment, guest-host Roxanne Khamsi speaks with Bloomberg columnist Justin Fox about the long history and many business models of the academic publishing industry. Plus, she interviews Chordoma Foundation co-founder and executive director Josh Sommer about his views on scientific paywalls and access issues, as a cancer survivor and patient advocate.
This is a segment from our May 28th, 2021 program, “__Not a Perfect Science._”_
Source: "Checking In on the Fight to De-Paywall Science | On the Media | WNYC Studios"
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