So, Nature said a thing about public access tonight. Everything is free to read* they say.

But there’s an asterisk, pesky and persistent, next to read. And it’s a big one.

The asterisk is that you can’t do anything but read the document, and you have to \soutdownload use their proprietary reader software in order to read the document, and you have to hope that someone who has a subscription or is a journalist is kind enough to share a link to the document that you want to read, and if you try to do anything other than look at the document passively on a screen you’re basically gonna get sued for copyright infringement.

I got contacted in advance for my take, and I really did think long and hard on this. I wanted to be impressed. I wanted to believe in it. I wanted to be courteous, to find common ground. And I am certainly pleased they included the backfile of old papers in their strategy, a longtime gripe of mine.

But I can’t praise. I just can’t.

The ability to beg for a link, to be opened in a closed ecosystem that literally disables core functions on your device like “print” and “screenshot”…that’s not an advance. It’s a canonization of a system that privileges the wealthy academic. It’s a canonization of a system that says it’s ok to pay for documents while simultaneously losing all rights. It’s a canonization of a system that says a small number of companies not only do control the world’s knowledge, but should control all the world’s knowledge.

Think about it. The people who are allowed to share the link are people who have paid enormous sums for the literature…yet they can’t send you something you’re even allowed to print on a crappy deskjet.

The right to index the literature so we can have scholarly search that doesn’t totally suck? Not here. The right to cross-reference the literature to databases? Absent. The right to start companies that can outdo the famous publishers on both of these fronts? Explicitly forbidden.

And we need those rights. As Dave Clifford noted…

So let’s do count that number. How many papers do get published? How long would it take to read them all, with no rights to get help from computers? Jason Priem has a handy chart for us.