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
2025-01-20
8
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] According to the passage, people who are unhappy with publishers of scientific journals______.
选项
A、criticize the unfair publication of scientific articles
B、object to their slowness and the high costs of the journals
C、blame them for the slow pace of recent scientific progress
D、think that journals should be abolished as an obstacle to freedom of speech
答案
B
解析
细节题。根据题干关键词定位第4段第1句,从后文可知批评集中在两点:出版时间长达数月;垄断造成价格难以下降。故选B。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3920558.html
相关试题推荐
Lifeinsurance,beforeavailableonlytoyoung,healthypersons,cannowbeobta
ItisimperativethatalltheaccountsofthePropertyManagementCompanyshould
Ifthereisanyendeavorwhosefruitsshouldbefreelyavailable,thatendeav
Ifthereisanyendeavorwhosefruitsshouldbefreelyavailable,thatendeav
Ifthereisanyendeavorwhosefruitsshouldbefreelyavailable,thatendeav
Ifthereisanyendeavorwhosefruitsshouldbefreelyavailable,thatendeav
Ifthereisanyendeavorwhosefruitsshouldbefreelyavailable,thatendeav
Ifthereisanyendeavorwhosefruitsshouldbefreelyavailable,thatendeav
Theprincipalholdsthateffortsshouldbemadeinthe______developmentofboth
Howmuchphysicalactivityshouldteenagersdo,
随机试题
Signhasbecomeascientifichotbutton.Onlyinthepast20yearshavespe
Forthelastfiftyyears,theglobehasbeenwarmingup.Itistruethat
[originaltext]ProfessorsfromYaleUniversityagreedinapaneldiscussion
ThehomelessmakeupagrowingpercentageofAmerica’spopulation.【C1】______
控制基岩库岸稳定的重要因素为()。A.水文因素 B.地质构造 C.岩体结
正型卡环中,起主要固位作用的部分是()A.舌侧卡环臂 B.卡环肩
行政复议决定作出前,申请人要求撤回行政复议申请的,经说明理由,可以撤回。
A.醇提水沉法B.盐析法C.酸碱法D.水提醇沉法E.离心分离法适用于蛋白质的分离
属于均相液体制剂的是A、石灰搽剂 B、炉甘石洗剂 C、鱼肝油乳剂 D、复方
关于如下横道图进度计划的说法正确的是( )。 A.如果不要求工程连续,工期可
最新回复
(
0
)