<p><pre><code> The decision of our faculty to make their papers freely
accessible online will ensure that the global community of
researchers, students, and casual followers of science and
engineering will learn about our work at earlier stages, enabling
them to put it to use for the benefit of society.
</code></pre>
I <i>love</i> how they mention "casual followers of science". To me this is a huge deal. I'm not a member of academia, but I really enjoy reading papers from a wide variety of fields (in the spirit of "learn everything about something and something about everything"). I never intend to stop, and I know lots of "laymen" who do the same.<p>The unavailability of papers, lack of centralized tools, and terrible search interfaces have been incredibly frustrating. I can't wait for a day when we get a centralized, non-profit, publish/subscribe consumer service for all the papers that ever get published by major research universities (with a good search tool). The value of such a service to the public and society would be <i>enormous</i>. As more and more people get educated and used to dealing with science, this could be as big a deal as wikipedia.<p>We're not quite there yet, but this is a huge step by CalTech in the right direction.
Congratulations Caltech on a great move! This will only have positive effects for the future of scholarly publishing.<p>Best part:<p>>Faculty may still grant exclusive rights to their publishers, either permanently or for an embargoed period, but to do so, they must request a waiver from the open-access policy. At other institutions with open-access policies, such as MIT and Harvard, faculty have requested waivers for about 5 percent of the total number of papers produced, usually to comply with the requirement of a few publishers that want a formal waiver in order to even consider manuscripts for publication.<p>5%, and in those cases, because of dinosaur publishers. This is a very conclusive sign for the shift in mentality towards open access.
> Indeed, some publishers, seeking to protect their own investment in scholarly work, have authorized third-party agencies to find articles posted in violation of their contractual rights and to issue Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices that threaten legal action if articles are not removed from the web.<p>Wow! Really? I am a math professor, and in mathematics I have never heard of this happening. It would strike me as professional suicide on the publishers' behalf: holding a knife to the neck of their golden goose.<p>It seems that I was not alone in this perception:<p><a href="http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9958/why-do-universities-tolerate-uploading-papers-on-their-websites/9968#9968" rel="nofollow">http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9958/why-do-univ...</a><p>Although I am in 100% in support of Caltech's policy, I would have guessed that the issue was mostly theoretical and that they were only taking a stand on principle. Either Caltech is bluffing, or I stand corrected. I'm not sure which. But in either case, kudos to them.
I'm a student (and researcher) at Caltech — and very excited to hear about this. I hope Caltech continues to push for open access. I know that many undergraduates would like to have course lectures posted freely online like MIT's open courseware.<p>I do wonder, how common is such a policy at other institutions? I assume this must be uncommon, since it's apparently newsworthy?
<i>At other institutions with open-access policies, such as MIT and Harvard, faculty have requested waivers for about 5 percent of the total number of papers produced, usually to comply with the requirement of a few publishers that want a formal waiver <in order to even consider manuscripts> for publication.</i><p>This is the one caveat. It would be great to out these journals. Seems likely is public/501c money going into the research on these, too.
It looks like we'll be able to access the MS-Word looking version for free. For the "styled/typeset" two-column version it looks like people will have to pay for the paywalled version.<p>At this point I'm left wondering:<p>1. Is the typeset version that much of a value add? Do people not realize how relatively easy it is to do these things on apart from publishing houses?<p>2. Is reading a single column version all that bad? We do it on the internet every day.