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  3. If there is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally,

If there is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally,

admin2013-09-16  61
问题     If there is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally, taxpayers who wish to should be able to read about it without further expense. And science advances through cross-fertilisation between projects. Barriers to that exchange slow it down.
    There is a widespread feeling that the journal publishers who have mediated this exchange for the past century or more are becoming an impediment to it. One of the latest converts is the British government. On July 16th it announced that, from 2013, the results of taxpayer-financed research would be available, free and online, for anyone to read and redistribute. Britain’s government is not alone. On July 17th the European Union followed suit. It proposes making research paid for by its next scientific-spending round which runs from 2014 to 2020, and will hand out about ￠80 billion, in grants similarly easy to get hold of. In America, the National Institutes of Health has required open-access publishing since 2008.
    Criticism of journal publishers usually boils down to two things. One is that their processes take months, when the internet could allow them to take days. The other is that because each paper is like a mini-monopoly, which workers in the field have to read if they are to advance their own research, there is no incentive to keep the price down. The publishers thus have scientists—or, more accurately, their universities, which pay the subscriptions—in an armlock. That leads to generous returns. In 2011 Elsevier, a large Dutch puhlisher, made a profit of ￡768m on revenues of ￡2. 06 billion—a margin of 37%. Indeed, Elsevier’s profits are thought so egregious by many people that 12,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of the company’s journals.
    Publishers do provide a service. They organise peer review, in which papers are criticised anonymously by experts. And they sort the scientific sheep from the goats, by deciding what gets published, and where. That gives the publishers huge power. Since researchers, administrators and grant-awarding bodies all take note of which work has got through this filtering mechanism, the competition to publish in the best journals is intense, and the system becomes self-reinforcing, increasing the value of those journals still further.
    But not, perhaps, for much longer. Support has been swelling for open-access scientific publishing: doing it online, in a way that allows anyone to read papers free of charge. The movement started among scientists themselves, but governments are now, as Britain’s announcement makes clear, paying attention and asking whether they, too, might benefit from the change. A revolution, then, has begun. Technology permits it; researchers and politicians want it If scientific publishers are not trembling in their boots, they should be.
The author’s attitude towards scientific journal publishers can be described as "______".
选项 A、basically favourable
B、deeply sympathetic
C、generally objective
D、strongly hostile
答案C
解析 本文第二段首句指出：在过去的一百多年，期刊出版商曾经促进了学术界的思想交流(have mediated this exchange)，但目前正日益成为交流的障碍(becoming an impediment to it)。第四段作者退而指出；出版商确实在“区分科研良莠”方面起到了一定作用。第五段作者进而指出，当前研究者和政客都呼唤“开放获取”，技术条件也已允许这一变革发生。可见，作者对出版商持一种客观的态度，认为它曾经起过巨大作用现在也不乏价值，但已不再适应当前形势，且弊大于利，[C]选项最恰当。
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