[asdff]

I guarantee anyone enrolled or alumni with credentials at Columbia and NYU can log into just about any journal on the school network on campus or with the school proxy anywhere in the world.

Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative. It's like having people without CS knowledge read through your source code and saying "Boom. Open source." By the time you explain someone the necessary conceptual ideas to understand these dense papers, you will be basically giving them a B.S. in biology.

The real crime with these journals is that it can cost thousands to have the privilege of your paper published. That's thousands that could have been spent on more reagents, equipment, or salaries to do even more science. Instead, you pay the toll troll, and you lost another x% of your grant earmarked by the government to do science.

[Vinnl]

You're stretching the definition of laymen here - often people with plenty of expertise, such as GP's, don't have access to the latest research, or have to make do with the access of interns. For examples, see https://whoneedsaccess.org

[matwood]

> Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative.

You're right. We should lock up all knowledge to only those are who are not laymen. Want to learn CS, go to school. Clearly the only way to learn is to be taught. /s

[icelancer]

> Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative.

This is probably the single most offensive thing I've read on this site.

I am a college dropout layperson who got a 0.0 GPA in my last semester enrolled in a liberal arts college who went on to replicate complicated experiments in sports science from these so-called "too technical to be informative" journals. A decade or so later, and now I run a fairly successful (30+ people employed) small business primarily because of the fact that I based my work on early publications I was lucky enough to get access through from students at the local public university.

With Sci-Hub, many terrible steps have been cut out of the process, and Elbakyan deserves Nobel Prize consideration for her work.

Meanwhile, your gatekeeping comments are elitist and only serve to increase inequality in all forms in this country (and the developing world, where academic freedom is truly useful to break paradigms).

Open source software need not be 100% understandable for it to be useful. We do business with as many vendors as possible that open source their code and work not because I am interested in validating their work, but because of the signal it sends that they feel comfortable and open enough to share their core products.

I hope you rethink your positions on these matters, because they're pretty offensive.

[Zak]

Being a layman in more fields than I am an expert, and having a habit of reading journal articles in various fields when the mainstream press reports on their findings, I have to disagree.

Of course, I can't (usually) read a journal article in a field in which I am a layman and understand it well enough to attempt to replicate its findings, critique its methodology, or make a follow-on contribution to the field. That's not the only value one might extract from a journal article.

What I can do is figure out if the mainstream press reporting on the article actually matches what the researchers found. The most common issue I see in mainstream press reporting is over-broad conclusions like "X is a cure for cancer" instead of "X is a 10% more effective treatment for Y type of cancer". Correlation reported as causation when the research did not draw such a conclusion is also annoyingly common.

[ineedasername]

what about the hundreds of thousands of doctors in their own practices that would like to keep current? I can tell you with the absolute certainty of experience that alumni do not retain such privileges at all schools. And when they do, it can be limited to in person access: not possible when you live hours or more away from your almer mater.

[wisty]

The world isn't made up of just laymen and students. There's also professionals. In some cases employers will pay, or individuals can pay, but journal payment schemes aren't really set up for this.