On 12 May 2012, at 15:37, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > This is a very good summary - as a;ways RP gets to the essence with clarity. > > On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Richard Poynder <ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk >> wrote: > >> List members will doubtless correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me >> that the nub of this issue is that Peter Murray-Rust believes that when a >> research library pays a subscription for a scholarly journal (or a >> collection of journals) the subscription should give researchers at that >> institution the right both to read the content with their eyeballs, and to >> mine it with their machines -- and that this should be viewed as an >> automatic right.
I consider myself a practicing scientist, who has probably wasted 1000s of hours (as have my students) scanning 1000s of articles over the years, with the aim of tracking down a single (and unindexed) fact which may or may not be contained in free text, and wondering why my time was in effect being so wasted. Multiply that up a million times or so and the wasted time accumulates rather impressively. Worse, students may be tempted to avoid this pain by not doing it. There are many examples of re-invention of the wheel because the literature can be so impenetrable to <humans> (and as Peter argues, less so to a trained machine which does not get bored). _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
