It's Gonna Get a Lot Easier to Break Science Journal Paywalls
EXTRACTS:
For example the Chan Zuckerberg Initative, philanthropic arm of the founder of Facebook, is working on something aimed at increasing access. The founders of Mendeley have a new, venture-backed PDF finder called Kopernio. A browser extension called Unpaywall roots around the web for free PDFs of articles.
A particularly novel web crawler comes from the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Semantic Scholar pores over a corpus of 40 million citations in computer science and biomedicine, and extracts the tables and charts as well as using machine learning to infer meaningful cites as “highly influential citations,” a new metric. Almost a million people use it every month.
ROBERT STEELE: This is one of the best article I have read on the general topic of why Elsivier (and Thomson Reuters and others are other ilk) are — like Central Banks — destined for the tar pit of history. The author misses the second half of the story, to wit that all he writes about is at best 1% of 1% of what is known, but if and when he does get to that story, it is sure to be a blockbuster and perhaps even a book.
See Also:
Robert Steele: Creating a Post-Western Independent Internet
