[GOAL] Re: OA and scholarly publishers

[Rzepa Henry]

On 12 May 2012, at 15:37, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

> This is a very good summary - as a;ways RP gets to the essence with clarity.
> 
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Richard Poynder <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk
>> wrote:
> 
>> List members will doubtless correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me
>> that the nub of this issue is that Peter Murray-Rust believes that when a
>> research library pays a subscription for a scholarly journal (or a
>> collection of journals) the subscription should give researchers at that
>> institution the right both to read the content with their eyeballs, and to
>> mine it with their machines -- and that this should be viewed as an
>> automatic right.

I consider myself a practicing scientist, who has probably wasted  1000s of hours (as have my students) scanning 1000s of articles over the years, with the aim of tracking down a single (and unindexed) fact which may or may not be contained in free text, and wondering why my time was in effect being so wasted. Multiply that up a million times or so and the wasted time accumulates rather impressively. Worse, students may be tempted to avoid this pain by not doing it. There are many examples of re-invention of the wheel because  the literature can be so impenetrable to <humans> (and as Peter argues, less so to a trained  machine which does not get bored).