Well said! The same situation exists in all subjects and the presented arguments can be extended to all of them. Perhaps lives are not always lost but time and money are, for sure. When a large chunk of research money has to be used up buying access to information, then less research gets done.<p>So these people who are in business of making money by restricting access to information that was altruistically provided by someone else are clearly promoting backwardness and ignorance.
I can never agree that publishing of academic papers is closed to subscription journals.<p>Isn't it in the best interest os science to have knowledge fully accessible by anyone?<p>It's just one of the cases where there are some people making a load of money out of a completely bogus business model that they manage to continue to lobby into persevering while there is no logical purpose for it to even exist.
Not fond of ridiculously-expensive journals. But you can extend any number of economic-pressure arguments to the conclusion 'X makes people die!' It sounds like alarmism and its not very convincing.<p>If you want Bangladesh to have access to journals/articles, start a fund to pay for it - that would be effective now. Its going to take time to change the system - you could even say "Advocating politically makes people die!"
Of course, a lot of things mean people die. Not having information is one thing. Also, for example, not having money means a country can't afford healthcare for its citizens. Should we give them all money for free healthcare? Hey, if you don't, PEOPLE WILL DIE. Can you live with that? Can you? Maybe you should give all the countries all the money they need, just in case. Because people could DIE.<p>I'm not against open access, but this is a bit of a silly argument. Charity is charity, and it's a good thing, but we shouldn't pretend that it is unethical _not_ to be charitable, otherwise charity loses its meaning and instead it's just.. I don't know... something else.<p>Again, don't misconstrue what i'm saying (I predict it will be miscontrued.) I agree with the principle that journals charge too much and that the whole academic publishing system is pretty much a racket. But the argument that DO THIS OR PEOPLE WILL DIE just makes you sound as bad as right-wing extremist political rhetoric.
well, maybe.<p>[paywall'ed access to information] means people die, IF the said information would still be discoverable under an open access system.<p>closed journals fill an important purpose in the ecosystem -- they provide friction[1] through cost, peer review and filter. it raises the bar for publication. it also means that without this aggregation and filtering mechanism, we wouldn't be able to find the important needles in the haystack, and that means people die.<p>go figure.<p>[1] seth godin on friction <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/friction-saves-the-medium.html" rel="nofollow">http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/friction-sav...</a><p>(i'm an engineer, i'm speculating)