More teeth

Quite by chance this morning, I stumbled across a new paper by the Ungar of the post before last, lurking behind the Wiley paywall: 'Dental microwear and diet of Homo naledi' from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology - with the naledi having lived in what is now the Gauteng province in the north of South Africa.

Being a recent paper it has not yet leaked out into the world of freebies, even when I ask Google, rather better at that sort of thing than Bing, at least in my hands.

Maybe one could make this into a good MSc project for a Department of Internet Studies. Pick up a few hundred paywalled papers of this sort on their day of publication and track their leakage out from behind their paywalls. Where did they leak to and when?

Leakage which I do not regard as theft. Most of this sort of thing has been paid for out of public funds and I think it is wrong that we, the public, should then have to pay again to see the results of what we paid for in the first place. Fair enough that Wiley should be paid for their value-add - but not US$38 for the pdf. A business from which I believe Elsevier (aka Relx) for one makes a great deal of money and manage a dividend of around 2%, this despite their share price having climbed pretty steadily for the last five years. Furthermore, I associate to a story from a Wikipedia editor (Wikipedia speak for contributor), at the conference noticed at reference 3, that he got much better support and feedback from the Wikipedia community than he did from commercial publishers, suggesting that the value-add is not that great.

Reference 1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ajpa.23418.

Reference 2: https://www.elsevier.com/en-gb.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wikimania.