Alan A very good take on the situation and I totally agree that Nature Materials should provide free access to all of its articles; otherwise it preaches one thing and practices another.
One of the articles at nature.com concerns Public Library of Science http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/butler3.html It would be interesting to see what comes of this experiment/boycott; if they can publish cheaper than commercial publishers then they would have enlightened us; time will tell but I have my doubts. Alan -----Original Message----- From: Alan Hewat [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, 25 March 2007 3:33 AM To: rietveld_l@ill.fr Subject: Re: Nature policy update regarding source code] > Hi Everyone; Just in case you don't follow ccp4bb or nature methods: > http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v4/n3/full/nmeth0307-189.html This does seem to mean that Nature will not accept results obtained with commercial software, or even free software like GSAS and FullProf, for which the source code is not available. In particular, Nature claims that: "Without the code, the software-and thus the paper-would become a black box of little use to the scientific community." Now no scientist would use a "black box" to obtain their results would they? Everyone author (and reader) of a Nature paper is clearly capable of understanding every detail of Rietveld and other computer code, starting with MS Word, which they probably used to write their paper. The same goes for diffractometers used to collect the data. Every Nature reader understands completely how they work, and could build one herself if she had the time. Nothing is a "black box" to a Nature reader. She is the Universal Scientist, otherwise her results would be of "little use to the scientific community". How do we know ? Naturally, because Nature tells us. But the big news is that from next week, Nature is allowing free access to all articles on its WWW site ! Furthermore, free copies of the journal will be sent to anyone who requests them. After all, if the scientific community does not have free access to Nature content, then Nature itself risks becoming of "little use to the scientific community". For a more rational discussion of the issue of "free lunches" in publishing, computing and databases, read other opinions of the scientific community that have generously been made available by a benevolent newspaper http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/ _____________________________________________________________ Dr Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>fax+33.476.20.76.48 +33.476.20.72.13 (.26 Mme Guillermet) http://www.ill.fr/dif/people/hewat/ _____________________________________________________________
