On 13 December 1968, the late Garrett Hardin published an essay in Science that was destined to become one of the journal's most requested articles in the subsequent 35 years. Below, we feature links to the original essay, and some of the scientific dialogue that Hardin's controversial ideas have spurred, as played out in the pages of Science.
SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.
Der Streit um den freien Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information gemäß dem "Open Access"-Prinzip hat sich durch die Forderung von Forschern nach einem "formatgleichen Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht" verschärft.