Recently, the ‘Research without walls’ pledge attracts
attention of the scientific community. Those who are signing in this pledge are
promising not to peer review for a venue that does not open their publications
for free. According to their website (http://www.researchwithoutwalls.org/),
the institutions with most signatures include Google, Microsoft and UC Berkeley.
I think this is a very good initiative.
In my opinion, everyone should have access to the new knowledge.
My undergraduate institution did not have any contract with most of the famous
journals. And, the student account was too costly for us. So, we were facing really
hard time to have a pdf of particular paper if there is no free copy available
online. Sometimes, we need to mail our friends abroad, who had access in those
journals to download the pdf for us. I guess there are many institutions in
third world country still facing this problem. In my opinion, ‘Research without
walls’ pledge is a very good initiative, which will eventually make the
publishers to publish their publications for free.
However, I know there are many technical and business issues
associated with it. Conference and journals need money to keep everything
working. They need money for their workers, for printing, storing etc. But,
most of the time, the money they demand to give access to their servers, are
not very feasible for the students from the poor counties. If those, who are
signing to the pledge, will agree to volunteer peer review for the free
publishing journals then open access conferences and journals will be a very
good alternative.
Lastly, I hope, this initiative will be successful.
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