That’s, conservatively, 100 articles per hour per day with no sleep ever to process a year’s worth of text…four years ago.
The lack of rights to re-process the literature is why science literature search sucks so very badly. We need computer assistance to process it, because the scope is beyond any one person’s mind. And open access would immediately create a market segment ripe for investment and competition.
It’s perhaps the biggest functional argument for open access in my mind. It’s a place where value can literally be created overnight. And it’s impossible under this announcement.
Apple’s iTunes is explicitly referenced in the article above. What’s not referenced is that this is what iTunes used to be, not the iTunes we have today. iTunes used to be full of technological protection measures that are still messing up people’s music collections five years after Apple stopped protecting files.
Think about it. Even Apple doesn’t lock you down to read-only.
Attaching digital locks to the files wasn’t good enough for consumers of music. Yet we are to accept it for, quite literally, the canon of western scientific knowledge?
Well, I guess it’s progress, because it shows we’ve made enough noise to force a massive player into what they think is a massive change. But open access, this is not.
UPDATE: Richard van Noorden notes that you don’t have to download the software to read in the browser view. I’ve updated the third paragraph to note that, with a strikethrough my original text. I’ve also edited for clarity a bit, and included a sentence about the policy’s access to the backfile of literature in the fourth paragraph.