[UnbugMe]

This is SSRN - arXiv for social sciences. You can download the full text of the paper if you click.

The paper, I think, makes a more interesting claim than you give it credit for: those areas that can afford scholarly work tend to make use of free resources the most. Based on this work, it is possible that open access alone is not enough to give poorer universities, etc. the access to scholarly work.

It's not clear what "agenda" you think the paper has. It seems like an interesting piece of work.

[bjornsing]

> Based on this work, it is possible that open access alone is not enough to give poorer universities, etc. the access to scholarly work.

I’d say it does give them the access, by definition. But it doesn’t ensure that they use that access of course.

It’s the good old equality of opportunity or equality of result debate, right?

[mistrial9]

> those areas that can afford scholarly work tend to make use of/ABUSE free resources the most ??

oohhh, this is ringing some bells right now

[UnbugMe]

How is it abuse? These resources have no marginal cost to produce and their creators generally want as much use as possible (think pre-prints, open access course material, ...). However, less well researched individuals (commonly found in poorer areas) are simply not aware of these resources.

If a data scientist at Google uses R instead of SAS (or some other proprietary statistical computing language) while a data scientist at a non-profit is forced to use SAS because of organizational constraints there is no abuse.