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\begin{document}

\title{Nature's Shareware Moment}



\author[1]{John Wilbanks}%
\affil[1]{DEL-FI}%


\vspace{-1em}



  
  \date{May 26, 2024}


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So, Nature said a thing about public access tonight. Everything is free
to read* they say.

But there's an asterisk, pesky and persistent, next to read. And it's a
big one.

The asterisk is that you can't do anything but read the document, and
you have to \textbackslash{}soutdownload use their proprietary reader
software in order to read the document, and you have to hope that
someone who has a subscription or is a journalist is kind enough to
share a link to the document that you want to read, and if you try to do
anything other than look at the document passively on a screen you're
basically gonna get sued for copyright infringement.

I got contacted in advance for my take, and I really did think long and
hard on this. I wanted to be impressed. I wanted to believe in it. I
wanted to be courteous, to find common ground. And I am certainly
pleased they included the backfile of old papers in their strategy, a
longtime gripe of mine.

But I can't praise. I just can't.

The ability to beg for a link, to be opened in a closed ecosystem that
literally disables core functions on your device like ``print'' and
``screenshot''\ldots{}that's not an advance. It's a canonization of a
system that privileges the wealthy academic. It's a canonization of a
system that says it's ok to pay for documents while simultaneously
losing all rights. It's a canonization of a system that says a small
number of companies not only do control the world's knowledge, but
should control all the world's knowledge.

Think about it. The people who are allowed to share the link are people
who have paid enormous sums for the literature\ldots{}yet they can't
send you something you're even allowed to print on a crappy deskjet.

The right to index the literature so we can have scholarly search that
doesn't totally suck? Not here. The right to cross-reference the
literature to databases? Absent. The right to start companies that can
outdo the famous publishers on both of these fronts? Explicitly
forbidden.

And we need those rights. As Dave Clifford noted\ldots{}

\begin{quote}
@wilbanks There's no reason a computer would ever need to read a pdf
instead of a human. *Counts the \# of publications last year.* Oh
wait.\\
--- Dave Clifford (@DCDave)\\
December 2, 2014
\end{quote}

So let's do count that number. How many papers do get published? How
long would it take to read them all, with no rights to get help from
computers?~Jason Priem has a handy chart for us.\selectlanguage{english}
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.98\columnwidth]{figures/tumblr-inline-nfxp2h7BDf1qezr1m/tumblr-inline-nfxp2h7BDf1qezr1m}
\caption{{Couldn't find a caption, edit here to supply one.%
}}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

That's, conservatively, 100 articles per hour per day with no sleep ever
to process a year's worth of text\ldots{}four years ago.

The lack of rights to re-process the literature is why science
literature search sucks so very badly. We need computer assistance to
process it, because the scope is beyond any one person's mind. And open
access would immediately create a market segment ripe for investment and
competition.

It's perhaps the biggest functional argument for open access in my mind.
It's a place where value can literally be created overnight. And it's
impossible under this announcement.

Apple's iTunes is explicitly referenced in the article above. What's not
referenced is that this is what iTunes used to be, not the iTunes we
have today. iTunes used to be full of technological protection measures
that are still messing up people's music collections five years after
Apple stopped protecting files.

Think about it. Even Apple doesn't lock you down to read-only.

Attaching digital locks to the files wasn't good enough for consumers of
music. Yet we are to accept it for, quite literally, the canon of
western scientific knowledge?

Well, I guess it's progress, because it shows we've made enough noise to
force a massive player into what they think is a massive change. But
open access, this is not.

UPDATE: Richard van Noorden notes that you don't have to download the
software to read in the browser view. I've updated the third paragraph
to note that, with a strikethrough my original text. I've also edited
for clarity a bit, and included a sentence about the policy's access to
the backfile of literature in the fourth paragraph.

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