Evade Fees with Altruism?

Rosie Redfield at RRResearch has announced the launch of ScienceLeaks, a blog that aims to circumvent publishers' paywalls and "serve[s] as a clearing house, providing links to the papers people want to read." Altruistic ScienceLeaks contributors can fulfill posters' paper requests by providing a direct link to a requested article PDF, Redfield explains, though she adds that "this is just a stopgap solution." In the future, she aims to set up an improved site — which utilizes a more intuitive interface and doesn't require that she delete resolved requests manually, she says. Looking forward, however, "the real solution is to change from having subscribers pay publication costs to having granting agencies pay them, either directly or as a line item in grant budgets," Redfield writes. At the time of this posting, ScienceLeaks has logged 10 paper requests.