首页
登录
职称英语
If there is any endeavor whose fruits should be freely available, that endeav
If there is any endeavor whose fruits should be freely available, that endeav
游客
2023-12-26
56
管理
问题
If there is any endeavor whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavor is surely publicly financed science. Morally, taxpayers who wish to should be able to read about it without further expense. And science advances through cross-fertilization between projects. Barriers to that exchange slow it down.
There is a widespread feeling that the journal publishers who have mediated this exchange for the past century or more are becoming an impediment to it. One of the latest converts is the British government. Recently it announced that, the results of taxpayer-financed research would be available, free and online, for anyone to read and redistribute.
Britain’s government is not alone. Soon the European Union followed suit. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH, the single biggest source of civilian research funds in the world) has required open-access publishing since 2008. And the Wellcome Trust, a British foundation that is the world’s second-biggest charitable source of scientific money, after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also insists that those who receive its support should make their work available free.
Criticism of journal publishers usually boils down to two things. One is that their processes take months, when the Internet could enable them to take days. The other is that because each paper is like a mini-monopoly, which workers in the field have to read if they are to advance their own research, there is no incentive to keep the price down. The publishers thus have scientists — or, more accurately, their universities, which pay the subscriptions — in an armlock. That, combined with the fact that the raw material (manuscripts of papers) is free, leads to generous returns. In 2011, Elsevier, a large Dutch publisher, made a profit of £768 million on revenues of £2.06 billion — a margin of 37 percent. Indeed, Elsevier’s profits are thought so
egregious
by many people that 12,000 researchers have signed up to boycott the company’s journals.
Publishers do provide a service. They organize peer reviews, in which papers are criticized anonymously by experts (though those experts, like the authors of papers, are seldom paid for what they do). They also sort the scientific sheep from the goats, by deciding what gets published, and where. That gives the publishers huge power. Since researchers, administrators and grant-awarding bodies all take note of which work has got through this filtering mechanism, the competition to publish in the best journals is intense, and the system becomes self-reinforcing, increasing the value of those journals still further.
But not, perhaps, for much longer. Support has been swelling for open-access scientific publishing: doing it online, in a way that allows anyone to read papers free of charge. The movement started among scientists themselves, but governments are paying attention and asking whether they might also benefit from the change.
Much remains to be worked out. Some fear the loss of the traditional journals’ curation and verification of research. Even Sir Mark Walport, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a fierce advocate of open-access publication, worries that the newly liberated papers have ended up in different places rather than being consolidated in the way they want.
A revolution, then, has begun. Technology permits it; researchers and politicians want it. If scientific publishers are not trembling in their boots, they should be. [br] The word "egregious" underlined in Paragraph 4 means______.
选项
A、somewhat unfavorable
B、rather unnecessary
C、strikingly unavailable
D、clearly bad
答案
D
解析
语义题。根据上下文可知,人们对于Elsevier的过高获利极为不满,因此egregious应为贬义,而且程度比较强烈。因该句主语是Elsevier所获得的利润,首先可以排除C(完全无法获得)和B(完全没必要),而A(有点不利的)程度不够,意义也不符合题意。通过排除法,正确答案为D(显然是不正当的)。
转载请注明原文地址:http://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3305999.html
相关试题推荐
坚定不移奉行多边主义和国际合作,推进国际关系民主化。Weshouldbecommittedtomultilateralismandinternat
坚持通过对话和协商,以和平方式解决国际争端。Weshouldseekpeacefulsettlementofinternationaldisput
Lifeinsurance,beforeavailableonlytoyoung,healthypersons,cannowbeobta
Asia’sfirstdemocracy—acountrythathasafreelyelectedgovernment—was__
WhenIfirstcametothiscountry,IthoughtlittlethatIshouldstayheresol
Weshouldnot______theWest,norshouldwepraiseittotheskiesandthinkgr
Chinanotonlywillendeavortocurbitspopulationgrowth,butwillalsoupgrad
Asia’sfirstdemocracy—acountrythathasafreelyelectedgovernment—was___
Lifeinsurance,beforeavailableonlytoyoung,healthypersons,cannowbeobta
Lifeinsurance,beforeavailableonlytoyoung,healthypersons,cannowbeobta
随机试题
A—multimediamessageserviceJ—fixeddialB—subscriberidentitymoduleK—aut
某水运工程在混凝土施工的过程中对混凝构件采取了相应的防腐措施,请回家以下问题:
下列合同,不会产生留置权的是()。A.保管合同 B.运输合同 C.劳动
湿温时疫之证见:发热倦怠,胸闷腹满,肢竣咽肿,身目发黄,颐肿口渴,小便短赤,舌淡
生物利用度试验中如果不知道药物的半衰期,采样应持续到血药浓度为Cmax的A.1/
在系统性红斑狼疮的多系统损害中,以哪项发生率最高A.皮肤 B.关节 C.肾脏
滚动调查是指一连串在不同时段采用相同内容开展的民意调查,目的是了解民意在时间维度
消防电梯井、机房与相邻其它电梯井、机房之间,应采用耐火极限不低于()的隔墙隔开
5.11 据中国载人航天工程办公室消息,天舟四号货运飞船10日与空间站组合
针对被审计单位发生的制造费用可能没有得到完整归集的重大错报风险,注册会计师可以实
最新回复
(
0
)