George Soros Funds Open-Publishing Software

blair1q writes "BBC has a story reporting that George Soros and his Open Society Institute are funding "open access" media for scientific publishing. These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide information to researchers whose institutions can't afford to subscribe to large numbers of overpriced periodicals. Part of the funding will go to improve the open-access enabling EPrints software, which is under GPL."

Comments

If there is peer review, I'm for it

[TheMatt]

As a grad student, I would love for this happen...as long as standards don't fall the the wayside. If Soros could get free journals with peer review, I'd support it with every ounce of my body. My university pays up the nose for journals and every year I read about how some journals need to be cut to meet the budget.

In fact, I've often wondered why universities pay an outrageous institutional price for the journals, when an individual can pay a lower price (albeit still exorbitant).

This is one of the true monopolies I would love to see end.

Is 'science' ending? An opinion.

[d.valued]

Dunno about you, but the last few major scientific releases have been first through a journal then to the world. Successful cloning, stem cell research, and most recently the artificial womb.

Right now, there's increasing pressure for scientists to close themselves off, mainly coming from their employers (companies).

What's happening to science is what happened to software. At first, the source was available, because the supplier didn't know if you could run the binaries and besides, you probably could help improve the code as well. Then, Ma Bell shut off the flow of source and caused the balkanization of Unices. After that, almost all software was binary for a particular platform.

Science started with open information sharing, and is perilously progressing towards a proprietarization of knowledge. Trade secrets are becoming more popular than patents because secrets are more protected. (Trade secrets are highly protected as long as no one else figures out how to do what you can do independantly, whereas patents are open to public inspection and expire. )