The DANGER Of For-Profit Science

TYT's Cenk Uygur spoke with filmmaker Jason Schmitt about his movie, Paywall: The Business of Scholarship.

Don't forget to tell us your thoughts in the comment section below!

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[jpny]

Authors of scholarly papers have power here. If you are a researcher who objects to paywall, insist on publishing exclusively in open access publications. Do not send your paper to prestigious non-open access publication no matter how much it would help you to get tenured. If you don’t do this, you have no business complaining about paywalls.

[YaGotdamBoi]

A lot of the time, the research papers and studies are available in databases that you only get free or semi-free (meaning free access to the abstracts and not the full papers unless you pay yourself for the full paper or can convince your school to pay for you) basis if you’re an enrolled student at a college/university and are able to find out where to gain access to those databases.

[jaelynn]

I would think that using open access will result in more collaboration as well as saving money. We SHOULD be giving more grants for verification studies on things that will be important in the future. It makes no sense for the world to not collaborate on certain things that will cut emissions.

[michaelm]

Not only is access to the research but the research itself is tainted by money as well, since getting published is the goal hardly any research is replicated and retested. Something like 90% of research suffers from this problem the results need to be verified but there's simply no money there

[jaelynn]

:34 Do you see him wink here? Right when he says "for-profit."

[RuleofFive]

Contrary to libertarian private sector or profit motive can fuck up any good thing!

[professorscambuster]

I watched this movie on Life Extension Advocacy Foundation's Youtube channel - it's good.

[GRepp-iynj]

This is a great appeal. This argument is often used to deny climate science

[jonashjerpe]

Researcher here. Don't believe that open access will enable lay people to contribute to science. Research is highly specialized. It is truly esoteric simply because of the background knowledge needed to understand it, let alone contribute to it. The costs of access to scientific journals is, however, still a problem, because it is very costly for university libraries and thus squeeze univ of money that could finance research and education. But don't believe the idea that open access will improve science or the level of scientific literacy of the general population.

[vilecrocodile]

I need a 50k grant to research lemur mating habits. Don't worry, the tax payer will fund it.