It's not just academics who are interested

I believe there are more issues with regard to open access to scientific knowledge than Phillip Broadwith stated (Chemistry World, April 2012, p56).

There are more people for whom such information has value than those who work in institutions – individual scientists, scientists who work in small companies, semi-retired and retired scientists. There is an additional feature to this set of scientists: they want to know the conclusions, and a general concept of how they were obtained, but they do not need the details of the scientific paper that the specialist in the field requires. To illustrate what I mean, I have recently self-published on planetary formation, and an item in the review was the plumes of Enceladus. What I needed was the composition of the plume and how that was obtained so that I could constrain the nature of the Saturnian moons. I believe this type of general information from a paper should be freely available, perhaps as a properly written summary and conclusions section published freely on the internet along with the abstract.

Finally, even though I have been self employed, I have published my share of scientific papers (about a hundred), I spent 10 years on the editorial board of a scientific journal, and I have done my share of peer reviewing. For this, I received zero dollars (and did not expect more). Is it too much to ask to be able to read some science in retirement? 

I Miller MRSC

Lower Hutt, New Zealand

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