Ok, so this is more of a rant than anything – but I think its so wrong that the vast majority of scientific papers are not freely available online. Lets face it, the vast majority of research going on at Universities world-wide is paid for by governments. If that government is a democracy, then that work was paid for by tax payers. So, why is it that when I try to find papers online I have to pay for them. Take for example www.sciencedirect.com, they charge $32 for each paper! And, you can’t preview the paper so you have no idea if its useful or relevant (the abstract really doesn’t cut it). Typically, if you want to survey a field of study you might need to reviews tens if not hundreds of papers. This is simply not tenable for a small company such as ours. The internet was perhaps the greatest technological achievement in history, its about time that scientific information flowed as freely as mp3’s, porn and youtube videos!

So, to the sciencedirect.com’s of the world – either open your electronic vaults to the world, or at the very least lower your prices to a sensible amount for the good of us all. Imagine the world where even the hobbyist and bedroom inventor can access the world’s combined scientific knowledge, and contribute to it. Perhaps, that is what they are afraid of!?