Open access to climate change material!

I'm not sure if I have made the point before here, or only on other blogs, but...

I see from the Nature website that Martin Weitzman has a review of Lomborg's latest book. Yet it is behind a paywall and would cost $32 (!) to get the article. There are also a couple of studies reported about the role of CO2 as the key greenhouse gas. One is in Science, behind a paywall (but available here via a skeptic site!), the other "companion" study one will be coming out in a different journal, and will almost certainly also be paywalled.

Routinely, important new papers on climate change (and ocean acidification) are behind paywalls. If you're lucky, sometimes bloggers or others made a .pdf of the article available.

Look, if those who edit and own the major scientific journals feel that climate change is a serious forthcoming threat for the whole of humanity which is capable of a political response now to modify the threat, why don't they adopt a policy of making such material in their journals available for free? It would be a modest but important attempt to make important material available to the public, who are, after all, pretty damn important in the political process.

If they say they can't do it financially, ask governments, or Bill Gates, or Google, to cover the (surely modest in the big scheme of things) cost of doing this.

I'm sick of this current system on the biggest scientific/political issue that we've ever seen.