Research Without Walls

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.