Slashdot Mirror
Publishers' Attack Free Government Sites
An anonymous reader writes "After succeding in getting the DOE's PubScience shutdown the Software and Information Industry Association and publishers' are now
targeting more. If the trend continues local tax dollars will increasingly be spent to buy access to information the federal government used to provide."
As a wise man once said, knowledge wants to be free!
"If the trend continues "
Industry Fact: When Elvis Presley died in 1977 there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world.
Today there are 48,000.
If the current trend continues, by the year 2010, one out of every three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.
Whats my point? Following trends is useless.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
And so do programmers, web page designers, and bandwidth providers.
Best Slashdot Co
Would anyone care to fix the apostrophe-related typo in the title?
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
But the publisher's were acting prudently in this case. The DOE was stealing and publishing material that the other publishers had bought the rights to. Just like we're not allowed to sell things for less than they cost, the DOE should not be allowed to do this. Seems to me like Justice has been served.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
After succeding in getting the DOE's...
Apparently spell[check]ing is not something that the poster has succeeded at.
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
These SIIA people are worse than the MPAA and RIAA combined. They are actively stealing MY money that I have ALREADY paided by squelching free dissemination of information. They are doing this purely as a way to gain market share for their members.
This is worse than the entertainment lobbies because they are limiting the rights that I have already brought with my hard "earned" tax dollars whereas the MPAA and RIAA are only targeting potential costumers. The SIIA and its members should be the only ones who should be barred from access to free information, peroid. This is insane people! Its things like the SIIA who make me want to go postal sometimes.
Usually they at least pretend that they're doing this for the public good. What's their excuse this time?
Even libraries can't have free information? We are truly one nation under the Dollar with liberty and justice only for those who can pay for them.
How ya like dat?
DOE accused of file-sharing...
OK... It's not a DivX version of spiderman, but scientific articles. But can someone explain the difference to me?
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Maybe it was the fact that no reasonable argument was made for why the publishers wanted these databases shut down, maybe it was the fact that the publishers have no shame, maybe it is just the general vileness of their kind, but somehow, I feel like something needs smashing.
How exactly does one look at this and not feel like these publishing corporations are the scum of the earth, who need to be wiped out by divine justice carried out by their hands?
Seriously, I'm not kidding, give me a coping mechanism, some justification, anything.
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
...it wants to make some money!!!!
Its amazing how information can set up all thes companies, etc, to promote/sell itself...
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
I guess there has been some moderation abuse over there, it rathers sounds like irony and if it desserved moderation at all, I'd rather give it a +1 funny than some moronic -1 flamebait...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Yeah, God forbid any old moron be able to access scientific papers and advanced knowledge. That's a commie concept. People should be happy with whatever the ad-supported news media gives them for free.
I would think making such information available would be in the interest of everyone... except those people who see a way to make a buck off it, which probably says a lot in itself.
Two in particular rile SIIA members: "One is law-related, the other has to do with agriculture," LeDuc said. He declined to identify them further.
Anyone care to guess which useful databases are about to be locked off to anyone who can't cough up the required dough?
I could go into a rant about how a "free market" in so-called intellectual property seems to rely heavily on restricting access to existing information instead of increasing access to previously-unpublished information, but I'll leave someone else to get flamed by the mindless defenders of privatization right or wrong.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
It's as if the North Kentucky Gazette-Tribune decided that it wanted to charge customers for online access to associated press articles - and had the New York Times and Yahoo shut down because they were offering access to AP articles for free.
"The DOE was stealing and publishing material that the other publishers had bought the rights to"
Baloney. The government had already paid for the research.
So now, I had to pay for the research to begin with, now I have to pay again to see the results.
By Jingy, you *are* a moron!
If my knee jerked that hard and that fast, I'd probably require knee braces all the time.
I'm thinking it might be a good idea to archive those sites which may be going away soon.
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
As a little boy, that must make you very nervous.
Cynicism is the natural defence of the romantic.
In fact, it can be the other way around. The most prestigous journals like Science, Nature and Physical Review Letters charge the scientists who want to get their results published!
The owls are not what they seem
Congratulations on being the first person to bash microsoft on this topic. I knew you could do it.
WTF is next ? You can use the same argument to go after brick and mortar libraries. Where will the greed end ? Count me in for the next revolution.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Is a list of SIIA members. Its important that we know who we are dealing with.
> luxury of freedoms such as these
Surely these "luxury of freedoms" are part of your way of life, so the terrorists are threatening your way of life, but the goverment is actually taking away your way of life to protect it from the terrorists. Ironic, is it not?
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
You shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition.
While "Where y'at?" is common in New Orleans it is poor grammar. However with your enlightening addition to the slashdot.org comment section I'm extremely impressed and humbled by your obvious intellectual superiority over the previous poster.
Before coming to any conclusions, I'd like to hear what the *editors* of these publications think of this decision - NOT the companies reselling their articles.
The corporations are always trying to squeeze out money. Today free govt sites, tomorrow terrerisom insurance. oh wait, that's today also. I guess they will have a lot of time on their hands tomorrow to plan where to get money from next.
We shall be targeting these so-called libraries in the near future.
-- The Publishers
Why do I want to pay for something that was already paid for by me and millions of other people thru tax dollars? I expect nothing more from the Bush administration than to cave in to corporations' every whim. Mind you, I don't think that Democrats are any better, but atleast occasionally some democrats hear the common people. Score one for the big guys.
On one side, the publishers have the right to demand that government-funded sites like that one were shut down. The publishers pay taxes just as everybody else, and it's a little weird if they have to finance free competition with their money.
On the other side, you have the ideal of scientific and technological innovation. The government is heavily involved here through copyright and patent laws.
It all boils down to what is better for the oublic good. If the courts think that offering free information will promote scientific innovation more than allowing only commercial innovation, then the publishers are right. If the courts think otherwise, I would like to see the free info on government Web sites back.
And just out of curiosity: how long till the Prima Strategy Guides sues all Web sites that provide free access to game cheats? And how long till a publisher sues me for providing free travel hiking advice?
I might be mistaken, but I am assuming that this information is in the public domain, or DOE got the rights to distribute the information. Couldn't a Non-profit organization be set up to do the same thing? Then it would be harder for it to be shutdown. Since its not government run then. I would also bet that if you got it going, you could convince the DOE to sell you their old site as the starting point for building the site. Then you set up some revenue/dontaion steams to fund it. And whala, a reincarnated site. Basically a Same Place, New Management deal.
Now that I am in medical school, research is like ten times easier because we have PubMed. I think that the goverment really has a responsibility to make sure all the research it funds is accessable to people anywhere in the country. I mean we paid for it, we should be able to see the results.
For those of you who don't know, to publish information to scientific journals amounts to extortions. First you have to pay for research, then when you have written your paper, you have to pay to submit it to a journal, then if they accept it you must help with publishing costs. Finally they require you to give them the copywrite to your work, and it you ever want to have another legal copy, you must purchase it from them.
Modern scientific publishing is extortion
"Having persuaded the Energy Department..."
Considering the Energy Department said it was okay to play shell games with California's utilities, it probably didn't take much of a push to have them agree to censor a few documents.
But an bigger issue is the homeland security bill that is about to be voted in the Senate. Some extra provisions have been sneaked in which give unlimited powers to government agencies if there is even a threat of a bioterrorist attack. It literally places no limitation on what they might do. As broad a stroke that can be made.
Good to see you're at work too.
I'm so sick of the bullshit that's happening these days. The government wants to shut down the legitimate and ethical research involving the cloning of a few human cells (not friggin' babies!). Corporations want to lock up all the information so that they can make people pay for it. Bush wants his war and regardless of whether Iraq complies with the requests or not, they'll still bomb the Baghdad.
If these people just could figure out a way of making a profit by selling the dog turds, they would sponsor laws prohibiting the dogs from shitting on the streets where everyone can have an access to the turds.
...as a programmer, I'd like to be free too :)
True warriors use the Klingon Google
n/t
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
If the trend continues local tax dollars will increasingly be spent to buy access to information the federal government used to provide."
The Federal Government provides nothing. It has no money of its own. Every cent comes from the taxpayer. There is no reason that a taxpayer should have to pay twice for any government service. Alternatively, taxes should be cut and all services should be offered on a pay-for-what-you-use system. Governments and NGOs need to learn that they can't have it both ways - that's nothing more than common theft.
This is the saddest thing I've read in a two days. Slashdot, why is the world so sad?
We're delighted with the decision [to shut down PubScience]," LeDuc said.
"We are delighted that the Democrats chose Nancy Pelosi as Minority Leader because it means they're out of touch with voters." Republicans said.
"I am delighted with the attack on the World Trade Center" Usama Bin Laden said.
I am disappointed in all this delightment in bad decisions.
The patent office? After all they have information online that anyone can use to violate somebody's elses patent.
Libraries? Those books can be scanned you know, so their very existence threatens somebody elses copyright and compete with commercial bookstores!
What about public television? Why every person who watches C-Span is taking food right out of those other cable network's shareholders mouths!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
They gotta eat too. I'd rather have my thick juicy steak than the stale bread they're handing out down the street. So, I'll gather up what knowledge I can, and charge people for it. They have cows. They have cooks. Sounds like to me we can make a good trade on that. But hey, the only system that works is socialism where the greedy elite can simply hoard everything tothemselves and not even allow for it to be charged for. Or hey, they can sell it to other countries while they are systematically exterminating their constituency. Mmmm... dictatorship! Is there nothing it can't do?
Just like we're not allowed to sell things for less than they cost, the DOE should not be allowed to do this.
Quite to the contrary. It is actually the primary function of governments to give us services at a price that would be unaffordable for the people who need them if they were made available by the market. You or I can't afford to buy police protection, or highways, or a military on the open market, but we need those services, and we elect our government to provide them to us outside the usual market mechanisms.
When it comes to scientific literature, society has a compelling interest in divorcing its availability from market sources. It should not cost $15 or $40 to get a research article. If it does, publishers are either price gouging, or they simple can't provide the service at the price that researchers can pay. Either way, the government has a strong interest to step in.
What is particularly galling about this is that the publishers actually pay nothing for the content: the content is created by researchers often paid for by the government or industry, and all the reviewing and editing is also done for free by volunteers. Authors even typeset the stuff themselves these days. If anybody is "stealing", it's the scientific publishers.
...your freedom to make a buck has no standing, NOT STANDING I SAY against anyone personal liberty. This is research paid for by our tax dollars. The people of the U.S. own it. Screws the pigs stuffing themselves on our dollar. Screws the government whores who rollover for the pigs on commands.
And damn the sheep that allow those pigs to lead them by the nose.
Blessed be for the dogs. Good hunting, dawgs. Say free. As long as you can.
Quote from the article:
"LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free. "
If its taxpayers money paying for the site, then we should be the ones to complain and say dont use our money any more. By shutting down a site that benefited more than just the scientific community the Software and Information Industry Association appearently speaks for ALL taxpayers.
Surely these "luxury of freedoms" are part of your way of life, so the terrorists are threatening your way of life, but the goverment is actually taking away your way of life to protect it from the terrorists.
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
It's a troll.
If it was flamebait, it would have baited some flames.
The Government attacks free publishers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It works like that:
Now that the web is there to distribute the article, what is the added value of the publisher?
If the SIIA behaves like that, nobody will complain when publishers are replaced by online journals.
Unfortulately, science evaluation is still made by counting the printed publications. When that is changed, the scientific publishers will collapse without anybody complaining.
Well, it looks like more profiteering sleazebags are going to try and steal information that belongs in the public domain and was bought by taxpayer dollars and actually try to charge people for it and shut down public access to information.
/. their server
now if *I* was president, I would make a short stop to thier HQ with a National Guard contingent and inform them face to face that I was claiming "Eminent Domain" and nationalizing all of thier assets, and If they didn't like it Sgt. Maj. can gleefully hang them from a lamppost.
However, now that Shrub is pretending to be president, I think we shall see more of this as his buddies try a full ham-fisted grab at public resources.
If you think these guys are sleazebags who should be shot, please visit thier website www.siia.net
or even write some email to some of thier employees
or even Elsiever Science
or mail to Email: usinfo-f@elsevier.com Email: cs_hscanada@harcourt.com although I am sure you can find more email addresses on thier contact page. remember boys, dont email them all at once or you might accidentally
Apparently spell[check]ing is not something that the poster has succeeded at.
I don't think it's fair to blame the submitter when spelling or grammatical errors make it onto the front page of /.. That's slash, dot, full stop :) Aren't editors there to prevent this?
Then again, if editors are cranioplegic enough to accept multiple story submissions on the same subject, often within days, I suppose it would be too much to ask that they actually proofread submissions before posting them!
(Editors: Don't just jump on me and moderate me into oblivion. If you don't like it, defend yourselves!)
I caught seven typos in this post. I know I've missed at least one!
This in particular struck me...
"We have no intention of going after PubMed."
First off, damn straight! Pubmed is just an abstracting service, you still need to pay for access unless the article is free (yeah PNAS), so why would they bother. Also, PubMed is instrumental to pretty much all research which is medically related. There's a general complaint about the PubMed barrier, if it is old enough to have been published without ending up in pubmed, many people treat it like it doesn't exist.
What confuses me was that I thought PubScience was supposed to do the same (abstracting service) for general science, which is much needed service, seems most of the decent physical sciences search sites don't just charge but charge a huge amount for the service. A broad based PubMed style abstract/search service is critical. Why kill it?
Here's a quote from the launch of PubScience (why I got so excited about it):
PubSCIENCE allows users to search across thousands of bibliographic citations from multiple journal sources to identify information of interest. It focuses on the physical sciences and other energy-related disciplines and is modeled after the National Institutes of Health's PubMed. A link, once identified, will deliver the user directly to the publisher's doorstep website to view the full text if made available by the publisher. Alternately, a subscription, site license, or pay-per-view options may be necessary dependent upon publisher provisions.
If that's really what they were trying to do, why kill it? It is a basic, necessary service. If anything it should increase publishers revenues as it gives exposure to smaller journals and decreases the barrier to literature searches, making it much easier to find articles that you want, no matter where they are published. They must have been trying to push it further or something or why would they bother fighting it. Does anyone know what the now defunct service offered, beside abstracting services?
Then this sends me off on a whole different rant...
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Fairer, maybe. In science though making information availible to all is a very important thing. They quote a figure of $15 - $40 for articles. This is accurate but ridiculous. No one in academics is going to pay that much (industrial research yes, but even they complain, come on, you're going to read a lot less if you have to make a purchase request every time you want to read an article). The only reason that literature system currently works at all is that institutional subscriptions are negotiated such that they are affordable, and reasonable use is interpreted pretty generously. You can always write the authors and ask for a copy but this is a system which is dying (it is much easier to manage a pdf than a paper copy). If you're at a small school though, it really marginalizes your work, you just can't get all the literture.
The really offensive thing here is the taxpayers comment. I disagree with it strongly. The taxpayers, by and large, pay for the research in the first place. The only research that isn't at least partially paid for by tax payers (this includes indirect things like charitable foundations) is usually proprietary. Worried about different countries contributing differently, the amount that the literature database is used will pretty much be in direct proportion to the degree to which you are in a position to contribute to it.
Why not make it available to everyone at a price everyone can afford? Sure accuse me of being a clueless idealist. It sounds like the publishers had a ligitimate gripe with people mirroring some of the articles that were availible from pay sites. My point is that the research is paid for by tax payers, the articles are written by researchs being paid by taxpayers and the articles are reviewed by peers, who are paid by taxpayers. In the past it made sense because the cost of actual publishing was high. These days there are only a few journals that people actually seem to want in print, almost everything is done by the internet, its just faster and easier. As most everything is paid for by tax payers, why not take it one step further and make it availible to them as well. All that would be needed a system for running the actual editing/online publishing system, which believe me could be done for much less than a grand per article (assuming only 100 people would have paid for an article and that the prices were lower, $10). Maybe its time the PNAS model (online everything is free) was expanded and the government pays for a few free but high/medium profile journals.
Okay, so I'm aware of not being in possession of all the facts, but if I'm trying to sell something that someone else is giving away for free, I would call that "being pretty SOL". If someone else in the same situation tries to cause the free source to be legislated into oblivion, I would call that "quite some bloody nerve".
How much is the taxpayer saving on this, and where is that money going instead?
Is it legitimate for a gov't agency to disseminate scientific papers, a) if they are gathering them anyway, because they are using them themselves, and b) at low cost for the agency, and the cost of an internet connection for the user? Or rather - how can that be construed as illegitimate?
I can understand that the publishers are pissed, but to stand up on their hind legs and claim that pay-per-use (and yes that's into our pockets) is in any way at all better - and to keep a straight face
yes, we have no bananas
...the end.
MP3 is evil.
DIVX is evil.
TXT is evil too.
Apparently, if you have a four-letter acronym with at least one pair of double vowels and a prevalence of I's and A's, you are required by the universe to try and stomp out personal rights in lieu of corporate profit.
smile, it's funny
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Anyone got their addresses??? Home, email, phone, fax, mobile?
:)
If we want some proper activism I think we should start at the top. Screw treating these things as some sort of abstract corporate bullshit. All these corps are run by human beings living here on earth, somewhere. Direct personal intervention may be more more effective and much cheaper then trying to out bribe them in DC. Or maybe they'll all just develop brake problems in their shiny new cars
SIIA Board of Directors 2002-2003, includes Oracle, Borland, Sony, Dow Jones, AOL TIme Warner, RealNetworks, Novell, Sun...
http://www.spa.org/glance/board.asp
The government pays Dr. Smith to write a scientific article. Dr. Smith gives the article to a scientific publisher and receives no compensation. That's the same publisher that Dr. Smith also puts in many hours in unpaid editorial work. The government puts Dr. Smith's paper on the web. The publisher, who contributed nothing to either the creation or the editing of the article, complains about this. They have neither a legal leg to stand on (the government refuses to sign over the copyright--they are big enough to be accomodated), nor do they have an ethical leg to stand on (the publishers contributed nothing to the content).
It gets even worse for educational or private researcher. Prof. Johnson writes a scientific article and needs to get it published in order to get tenure. The IEEE or Springer or whoever says: we only publish this article if you sign away all your rights to it and then some. Prof. Johnson also needs an editorial board position on his resume to get tenure, so he puts in many more unpaid hours doing editing, reviewing, and clerical work for the publisher.
Scientific publishing is a racket similar to the mafia. The only difference is that scientific publishers don't kill you with a bullet; it's just if you don't cooperate and put in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of specialized, unpaid labor, your scientific career is over.
So, there you have your answer. For the DivX, the legal and ethical copyright holder complains. For the scientific articles, companies with no legal or ethical basis flex their political muscle and get their way. It's pretty disgusting.
Damn, sorry for the rant. I blame it on my caffeine drip being a little weak.. guess I need more Bawls. All donations gladly accepted :-p
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Whatever happened to doing something for the common good of society?
Gawd, that's brilliant. Thanks for the laugh. :)
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
As are: the Association of Public Television Stations (I'll hazard a guess that they are what they sound like), The Kermit Project, and the Association of Shareware Professionals.
...for this sort of nonsense. If we hang a few, we will have a lot less of this sort of betrayal.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
Unfortunately, this illogical policy goes much farther than just publications, where some giant publisher like Elsevier can claim the rights to US-taxpayer-financed research.
In fact, the taxpayers are being robbed blind at almost every corner. For the large defense contractors, the lion's share of their funding comes straight from Uncle Sam. Yet they have the right to deny the public's access to the results of their government-funded research, and slap the label of "Proprietary IP, Disclosure Prohibited" on everything. (note: this has nothing to do with whether the information is classified due to national security concerns.)
This is also done by the universities, which have the rights to the research done there, even if it happens to be funded by the public.
If it is capital provided by the taxpayers that funded, say, a certain type of microprocessor's development at a corporation, does that give said corporation the exclusive right to make money off of the idea commercially?
This kind of garbage makes my stomach turn. How in the world can this sort of thing be tolerated?
News flash boys and girls: By definition, members of a free market economy should not be offered any concessions of this sort.
Sigh... Wake up America! We now live in a socialist society!
The DOE was stealing and publishing material that the other publishers had bought the rights to
It's too bad that the site is not in the wayback machine, but as long as we're making inferences, this clearly is not what happened. If there were copyright violations, the site would have been taken down immediately. Clearly, the site was making information available to US citizens that they already have the rights to. According to the article, the site was not taken down for IP reeasons, it was taken down as a matter of public policy.
Just like we're not allowed to sell things for less than they cost, the DOE should not be allowed to do this.
I don't know about you, but Uncle Sam makes me pay taxes. So, the DOE is just giving me what I already paid for.
Let's be clear about what the private interests behind this are doing. They are not producing information, they are brokering information that the public has a right to. They want to restrict the public's access to public information so that they can sell it back to them.
It's a lazy man's business model. It's like obtainng the right to charge people rent for using their own property.
Has anybody here heard of the Lockean Proviso? The proviso tries to specify when it is OK for a private person to lay exclusive claim to a public resource. It says that a private entity can stake a claim to an unowned thing so long as the stock of such things is not in any practical sense diminished. If there are plenty of desert oases, then you stake your claim to one and build "Ahab's Desert Resort and Theme Park". In fact it does the public good, by providing added value among the choices of oases. If, however, there is only one critical oasis that everyone who crosses the desert needs to share, then it is not right to deny the public access to it.
Observing the Lockean proviso encourages people to build business around adding value, not restricting access. This is what the people selling the public access to public databases should do: build more comprehensive, better indexed and organized data. Witholding information from the public so that some private entity can profit is bad public policy and immoral.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think this is yet another case of a black and white view on things: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, public vs. private. It's always all or nothing, but yet the world is gray.
Same services provided by public and private entities can very well exist together without unfair competition. Take public health care and private clinics in Northern European countries, for instance. You can get your ailment treated within days or a week in the public sector, but if you want immediate action you can pay and use the private services.
It's the publishers' responsibility to develop a service that people find worth paying for!
The government should be allowed to make the raw science, paid by the tax money, publicly available for all with no or a nominal cost. This could be done, for instance, in a form of a pre-print library where the manuscripts with figures are stored in the raw format the authors prepared.
Now if the publishers would typeset these manuscripts into a neat format, print them out and deliver them via net or on paper, I'm sure that some people would find that worth paying for. Perhaps the publisher could have a website where supplementary data regarding the article can be submitted by the authors and accessed by paying customers. Normally such data is obtained by e-mailing the authors and requesting for it, but sometime's it's a hassle and having the data always available on a commercial data base would certainly appeal to me.
The owls are not what they seem
I was just wondering if the "unfair governmental-sponsered competition" that the article references was lifted from the the pages of NAFTA. Does anyone have any further info/links on the PubScience shutdown? I recall public debate over NAFTA's broad authority in such situations, and (in reference to yesterday's article: "leaky abstractions") was thinking that this could be a case in which NAFTA "leaks".
dump to : alt.ostn.ee .
;) ????
or what about p2p
You will see this going on more and more, as long as the Republican party holds the reigns of power: it is simply privitization for personal gain. I live in Colorado, and because of our budget deficits due to outlandish tax cuts we are having to "decrease government" on the state level. Thereare already a lot of really shady privitization for personal gain deals (i.e., rewards for the faithful supporters of the Republican Party) wending the way through the corridors. A building here that is no longer needed, subsidized rollover of a long term lease for offices of people who are going to be pink slipped, maybe even sell off a little of the state forests (you will never see the notice of the auction), etc. I remember back in the Reagan era they were talking very seriously about selling off the national forests to raise money-even had formed syndicates of high rollers to buy *huge* blocks of forest and assigned blocks of forest to individual syndicates-when the Democrats got noisy and they chickened out. Don't know how far they will have the nerve to go this time, but there will be plenty of rewards like this one. A feller could get quite cynical watching all this.
Recently the Open Channel Foundation did begin making it available free. Open Channel apparently hopes to fund itself by commercializing some software.
Publishers Attack Free Government Sites! Lethal Amounts of Apostrophes Leaked!
Slashdot Hit Hard
When are the Merkins going to realise that they have pissed away everything that they fought the War of Independence for?
I went to the following site and sent an email/form to request the best way to reverse this decision and/or who was the best person to complain/discuss it with. They will probably say your congressman/senator, but who knows. I love seeing something I paid for already making a foreign company money.
http://www.ma.doe.gov/energy/comments.html
I try to limit myself to one spelling or grammar flame per month, though heaven knows there is ample opportunity for more.
You don't form the plural of a noun by using an apostrophe. "Publishers'" would refer to the collective property of several publishers. In this headline, it should just have an 's', no apostrophe.
If someone has the resources, they could file FOA requests for all DOE white papers and articles on various scientific areas not classified under national security and make them freely available on the web. You could replace PubScience with PubScience.org, declare it a public charity, file a IRS Form 990EZ and write off everything you put into it as a tax deduction for charity (the education of today's youth) and there isn't a damn thing that the Software and Information Industry Association could do about it.
I never knew pubscience existed until it was destroyed...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Uh, you missed the double speak of this...
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Translate: LeDuc said that it is better to make him and his employers rich than to make knowledge freely available, and that it doesn't matter if any of the research (lots of it, if not most of it) were funded by the government, i.e., funded by the public.
What research have LeDuc and his friends funded lately? Sad.
Cheers,
e.
Cheers,
e.
And the rest of the address:
Software & Information Industry Association
1090 Vermont Ave., NW
Sixth Floor
Washington, DC 20005
telephone: +1 (202) 289-SIIA (or 7442)
fax: +1 (202) 289-7097
LeDuc's at extension 1352
A friend of mine recently pointed out that a staggering new doctrine has been slowly weaseling its way into American minds for decades now. That is the belief that businesses have a right to a "fair" profit for work that they do.
It's the spread of cost-plus contracting doctrine.
Think about it.
Increasingly companies have been getting away with portraying big business a some sort of glorious activity for the good of society (Think Chrysler bailout or protectionism for U.S. steel companies.)
Here in New York restaurants have gotten away with having almost all the street vendors shut down or regulated out of existence because it was "unfair" for some poverty income immigrant pooling the money of twenty relatives to sell tasty kebobs on a street corner and undercut the prices of snotty wealthy restaurants charging airport-style prices for food that customers (like me) didn't want anyway.
As far as I'm concerned our current regime is out of the closet by now. They are anti-capitalist and anti-productivity. True free market capitalism would take away their Microsoft-type profits and true productivity gains tend to come from the sorts of small companies that don't get favors from the Bushes and Cheneys and Powells.
Me? I'm the founder of a small business that sells formatted information to pay the bills. I'm well aware that to Reed-Elsevier, Time Warner, Westlaw, and their ilk I'm a street vendor cutting into their profits. In fact, if you take the story of the Steves offering their designs to Atari, that pretty well describes what happened to me with T/W and McGraw-Hill. They turned 'em down, now I'm doing it on my own. I plan to fight the dirty bastards right down to the goddamn wire.
Deal with it, people. The American public has elected a bunch of crooks who are systematically reshaping our country as their whore. Better get used to bending over and spreading wide.
Rustin H. Wright
Founder, Reed&Wright
Former techie/consultant to the publishing business (Harcourt-Brace, Houghton-Mifflin, Scholastic, J.Crew, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Gruener and Jahr, Capital Cities, etc. etc. etc.)
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Reading such a story really angers me. Next some companies shall say that public schools are unfair competition to private schools? That government funded healthcare (as many civilized states offer) hinders competition between private hospitals?
This makes me sick, if this is what capitalism is leading to, I don't want to be a part of it.
What such companies do is making the public only shift to radical left (seriously, I'm not at that level yet) and thus destroy themselves in the long run.
See subject
If the papers document tax payer funded research, then the documents should be available at no ADDITIONAL cost, since we already paid for it.
And the company charging the outrageous fees should be sued for fraud.
If its privately funded, then sure, it was wrong to publish for 'free' and all bets are off..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Publishers' Attack..."
LOOK, DUMBFUCK. When you are taking something that is singular, i.e. "PUBLISHER," and making it plural, you DO NOT FUCKING USE AN APOSTROPHE!!!!!
ONE PUBLISHER. TWO PUBLISHERS.
NOT TWO PUBLISHERS'!
FUCKING MORON!
What makes you think the folks as that "service" that charged $5/minute does not want pubmed shut down?
What's over the top here is that the government does not need the services of these "publishers." The government pays for all the bandwith it needs, organizes the research it funds, and could easily share these articles with everyone without anyone's help or additional costs. Next thing you know, the publishers will be asking Uncle Sam for base operating costs because no one wants to use their overpriced service. It would really burn me up is the "publishers" in question were getting their information from the govenment to begin with and they have restricted other's access to the same.
As the government has bowed out, it's up to researchers now to present their work themselves and form their own peer reviewed journals and librarians to organize it. The government has told these publishers that they may live by the sword of free competition. Let them die by it as well. If public libriarian can not aid the effort, let private school librarians do the work and share it. If "publishers" can get this information from the government, librarians should be able to as well. This is what researchers and librarians do for a living, right? Librarians don't just exist to collect comercial publications, they are supposed to collect ALL infromation available and present it in a usable manner. Researchers create the information.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
At least deserves a +2 Funny. Where is your sense of humor? gone in the way of Hemos' command of English?
Cheers,
e.
... free as in herpes.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
and write to your senators/state reps. Whining about it to other slashdotters accomplishes nothing.
It is indeed WORSE than what other agencies (RIAA and MPAA) have been doing, although now they we are used to their behavior, it only seems like a small step, no? And now we see where this is leading.
It starts small, with stuff that is somewhat legal from some people's point of view, but which is ethically disputable (RIAA going after Napster), then this small step leads to another small step (attacking P2P networks), then it becomes an attack on individuals (hacking people's computers???) and finally you criminalize something that used to be legal (sharing music and books...).
Then someone else catches on the bandwagon, and other industries do the same thing. They start small, with less known web sites, and manage to get them shut under reasons that may seem somewhat-ok, then they go after more, and more, until they are in control of information.
You think a government that controls/restricts information is a bad thing? Wait until CORPORATIONS are in control!
And governments are helping them! They are so afraid of looking weak and not helping the economy (or not helping those who finance their elections) that they are starting to do all they can to help corporations continue making money, even though their business models may not be viable or may be ethically disputable.
And so we have a new variation on the old 1.2.3:
1- Create business model
2- Have the government pass a law that makes the model profitable
3- Profit!!!
There are two things that make me REALLY sick in this world: needless destruction (especially of knowledge or pieces of art) and witch hunts (I don't mean real witch hunts, but the accusation of innocent people by people who are convinced they are right; see The Crucible by Arthur Miller, or watch "The Drumhead", ST:TNG episode if you want to know what I mean).
And this is starting to smell of both. File sharing for non-commercial purposes is LEGAL and ETHICAL. To punish or restrict the freedom of individuals to protect monetary interests is WRONG and UNETHICAL. To restrict access to knowledge is WORSE.
Because that would be just the beginning. If corporations are in control of distributing knowledge, they will be able to decide which knowledge we have access to, and which we don't. Governments shouldn't have that right, and they are supposed to look after the well-being of the people, corporations intend only to make more money, and if someone pays them to "make disappear" a piece of research detrimental to another corporation, what of it?
So where is this leading us? I don't know, but I certainly don't like it.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
When I was a grad student, the taxpayers paid about $750K/year to keep our lab going. We published five or six papers a year.
Those papers were then sent to UNPAID peer reviewers (professors at other universities.) Of course, that's part of their jobs, and a good chunk of their salary comes from the same government grants.
So far so good. I think the publicly funded research has generally been good for the country and humanity as a whole.
Now, the journal we published the articles in holds the copyrights, charges $20 for a reprint, and a subscription is literally tens of thousands of dollars a year. Remember - they didn't do the work, or pay for the research, or even pay the article reviewers.
So this nonsense about "the government paying for something than can be provided privately" is nonsense. The government has paid for 99% of it already, these companies want to profiteer on the back of those government expenditures.
If the government is funding the research, should the citizens have open access to the results?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I'm mad at the political corruption, I deplore Elsevier et al., but academic researchers earn my utter and unreserved contempt.
Why is publishing so important to your career? Because you're misguided. You see it as a gold star on your cv, but I see it as a mark of academic treason. You might as well tell your colleagues "I'm a knowledge whore. I'm a knowledge tool. All knowledge that passes through me can and will be commoditized. Will think for money!"
It's vanity, you pinheads. You're being exploited by your own vanity--but you are not the only ones at the mercy of the publishers. Your libraries are being forced to cut back, your students have less access to information, and the public is being cheated.
Only you have the power to rectify the situation, my dear pinheaded scientist friend. If you choose the status quo, if you do nothing, do not be surprised when the general public puts you out on the street, with your big old cardboard sign reading "Will think for money!"
Spending tax dollars on a gov't website is debatable, but the company I work for (www.nicusa.com) actually fixes that problem. We build, and host, state and local government websites at zero cost from the tax funds. We make our money by charging "convenience fees" on certain online services. However, we ONLY charge a fee if it is for something that already had a statutory fee to begin with (ie, if it normally costs $20 to do this filing, we'll charge you $21.50 to do it online and have the convenience of not standing in line at the DMV or whatever). If anything, it actually SAVES tax dollars since when people use the online services they aren't taking up the time of a gov't employee, so less gov't employees are needed. Works out well all around.
"Editors ignore Slashdot."
"Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access"
/joeyo
2^5
The fact of the matter is that if Slashdot had posted the article in reverse - "PROGRAMMERS AND SYSADMINS LOSE JOBS BECAUSE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GIVES AWAY THEIR PRODUCT" then the slashdot socialist crowd would be up in arms.
You're obviously new here.
I'd like to send you $15 to pay the entry fee to a private library (you won't want to be caught dead in a public one!). Go do some research on the topic "open source." Depending on your reading skills, you might also want to look for something called "Security-Enhanced Linux" that was once produced by the NSA. Produced by the NSA until people like you stopped it, that is.
No sir! Projects funded by the people, for the people never have any benefit to this country! Nope, none at all!
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Right on! In other news, it is much fairer to charge students to enter public (taxpayer-funded) schools than it is to charge taxpayers the cost of maintaining the doors. And those damn drivers should have to pay a private company to get through intersections instead of having taxpayers pay for traffic signals on roads. Taxpayers might pay for all of these things, but we need to make sure that the actual users pay private companies for the right to use them. After all, the trivial cost of access is the real burden, not the research/development/construction/staffing/mainten ance costs...
Wayback Machine results for pubscience
Interesting that so many publishers are sponsors! Big Shrug!!!
Any act of aggression intended to alter the government policy pretty much makes you a terrorist.
Yes, Even if it's a policy of facilitating unfettered corruption.
Here's a suggestion for you and other irate Slashdot readers: LEARN as much as you can about politics. Aspire to know the top 50 lobbiests, where they get thier money and what they are getting in return. Find out what issues people really care about, and learn how to leverage thier concerns to care about your concerns. Go beyond hypothesis and speculation, and get the facts. Share your findings, make your findings compelling, share them with everybody.
When the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, there were hundreds of millions of Muslims who understood why...
We're about as understood as those radical enviromentalists, yet our issues are non-partisan that mainly address plain-vanilla corruption.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
If the media companies get their way with .gov web sites without a murmor of protest they WILL go for the public libraries next.
How can a monopoly make a cent these days if people can read books for FREE?!?
(And what about those 2nd hand book stores, they have to go too.)
This isn't just an issue in the USofA... patent information publishers (who "add value" by abstracting, normalizing, and indexing obscure documents) are fighting the European Patent Office plan to offer enhanced end-user patent searching on their website.
The danger is that the government picks off the low hanging fruit, making it harder for businesses to make a profit doing the part of their work which does give a value to society.
I've never worked with IEEE. Give me some inside juice. The terms look beter than most on the surface.
Peer review is part of active research and should be thought of as part of any research position. It keeps you up to date and sharpens your brain, kind of like Slashdot but there are fewer trolls.
The burden of clerical work is a different and unrelated issue. You should have an expert at digital publishing who can take your plain text, raw data and notes on equations, and turn them into decent looking papers on the web and on paper trough Apache, LaTex, DX and any other useful system. Secrataries should be up to this task. Anything else is wasteful of real research time.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Al Queda delcared it will not be going after ClubMed. "Let the hethens drink themselves to STDs and early graves," claimed a source that wished to remain anymous.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The battle is not between us and Al Queda, or us and the corporations, but between us and our managers.
Um. Not quite. Much though I understand your sentiment (look at my post above to see just how pissed I am), one problem does not simply cancel out the other. There are any number of foul and destructive things in the world.
Our kleptocratic government/corporations are one problem.
Anti-progress violent reactionaries are another.
Just because there are dangerous sleaze here doesn't mean that the existence of dangerous sleaze elsewhere is somehow less real or urgent.
Yeah, it sucks. We're in a multifront war and we've handed the keys to our defense against one enemy to another enemy. Good thing the actual military is still on our side.
Oh, and by the way, simple answers like "just elect angry people with a grudge against the current power structure" is how the even worse tyrannies get created.
Look into the history of Nazi Germany. The Nazis said all sorts of things in the twenties and thirties that were very convincingly anti-corporate. Same for Mussolini and, *ahem*, Saddam Hussein.
No simple answers, folks. No quick fixes. You can't clean a two bedroom house in one step. We certainly can't clean up a three hundred person nation in one.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
WHAT THE F*CK???? Mod this UP, morons, not down. You're just as bad as the freaking SIAA!
-- Bob
Since when does the U.S. government have an obligation not to compete with an existing commercial enterprise? This is literally saying that if I'm in the paving business, it's illegal for my local government to have a department of public works...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The U.S. government seems to be very inconsistent about providing public-domain information over the web. I wish they'd settle on a policy, hopefully of making everything I paid for wity my taxes freely available!
I didn't know about PubScience, but I have spent time trying to access USGS map data over the web. This data is a pain to find. The USGS has "business partners" who only make the data available for a fee. I generally have to track down the data state-by-state, from state-based agencies who make the data available for free (though they sometimes apply different licenses to the orignal USGS data), and some states aren't available.
In addition, I recently wanted to research the results of a class-action lawsuit on the U.S. Federal Courts website. It turns out that you can't do that easily. You have to register, wait 2 weeks for them to snail-mail you an access account, and if you look at too many pages (more than $10 worth), you get billed.
These agencies need a consistent data-distribution policy, and then with that, they'd be more immune to individual attacks by the SIIA and other deep-pocket lobby groups.
What only the rich get to defend themselves well, even more so than it is already?
This article makes me want to cry. What happened to you America? Where did we lose you? Did we ever have you.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
It should be 'Attack of the Publishers'.
:)
I mean come on, ATOC was just released on DVD and this is slashdot.
Citeseer is one of the best free online Computer Science digital libraries. If you are ever doing research in CS, check out Citeseer first!
Yes, but only to those with eyes to see.
If you are an American, did you vote?
The rich vote to keep corruption alive (or at least keep themselves rich). Politicians listen to rich people. Why? Because they vote. Yeah, the rich may give politicians money, but votes (or lack there of) get them into office.
The poor don't vote because they can't change things (or atleast that's what they think). If you are an American and have the eyes to see this then go out and vote, oh yeah spread the word too.
Because remember you are only one vote.
Maybe the +70% of people who don't vote, and probably aren't rich (because we don't have that many rich people in America) can change the system.
Think about it.
Martin Luther King changed the system without even voting. He just convinced others to stop buying services (unless equal treatment was given).
If it were a Canadian or Mexican company making the claim, then it would fall under NAFTA, but I don't think that a US Company can make a claim against the US Gov't under NAFTA. It holds jurisdiction on cross-border disputes, if I'm not mistaken.
i - This sig provided by
What's next? A private hospital suing to shutdown a government-run free public health clinic because it's competing with them?
11*43+456^2
....we can do anything we want to do. This is OUR country. If we want to pass laws to HANG bureaucrats and politicians who sell us out, then we can DO SO.
I have been voting since 1976. I bet I know a lot more about politics than you do.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
When you trade or sell regular goods to somebody, there is a real trade : goods for money or other goods. Whatever the material goods, when you've sold it or traded it, it is no longer yours and you may no longer benefit from it. Therefore, there is an interest in creating a market economy based on shortage of goods -- which is what capitalism is based upon, and which appears (so far) to be sustainable : the society as a whole does not suffer too much from that shortage, given that prices tend to regulate through the demand and supply mechanisms.
On the other hand, when you trade ideas or informations with somebody, or when you teach him/her a new skill, you *still* have the skill/idea/information that you have just given to your partner. Even if your partner has nothing to trade for this information, you still have that information and you can continue to benefit from it ; you do not end up "poorer" than before the exchange, contrary to what may happen with material goods. Actually, if you trade an information for another, you end up being *wealthier* than before, which is not likely to happen when you trade material goods at a regular price [i.e., with little margin, if at all]. Then you may share/trade this new amount of information with someone else, and so on. Contrary to what the SIIA says, the whole society benefits from having lots of ideas and information running around freely, instead of having only a few wealthy research groups being able to afford such information.
Therefore, a society has no interest in creating a market of science or information based on shortage of the "goods". Sure, it takes effort and money to produce that information, and yes, these should be rewarded as well. But creating a shortage of information to enforce an oligopoly, which seems to be the aim of SIIA, may have dramatic consequences on the economy of a society, and even for the SIIA itself. When tolls are instated for the exchange of information and ideas, the whole process of research and creation will be badly hampered. Scientific breakthroughs will be fewer and farther between. And foreign nations and societies might know better...
I think the whole idea of having the people pay for access to knowledge (and I mean paying obscene amounts of money, like for a scholarship in the US -- not paying the basic costs of teaching and rewarding the research of scientists) is a handicap for a society. The more people have access to knowledge, the more likely someone is to come up with a brilliant idea. And no, being able to afford a Harvard scholarship does not mean you are a genius. To me, having the State pay for making scientific information freely available, is something that the whole socitey benefits from in the long term.
However, having people pay for access to information seems to be a general trend these days. Oh, well...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Its really that simple. They don't contribute ANYTHING to the process, and they get tons of money from it.
The vast majority of scientists who did the research did so using government grants; the vast majority of scientists who did the reviews either did so for free or were being paid by government money (i.e., the government gives money to universities, as well as tax breaks).
Then, after all this is done with public money, they privitize the information, making US the taxpayers pay again for what we've already paid for.
Taxpayers pay alot of money to contribute to scientific research; they should be able to access the results, research papers, review papers, and abstracts free of charge.
Anything else is just crooked and unconstitutionally forces the taxpayer to pay again for what which (s)he already owns.
If ANY of the TAXPAYER's MONEY is used for the research or reviews, it should ALL be available to the taxpayers for free, in the public domain. If you don't want to make it available free, then you shouldn't use ANY government money.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I used to work for one of the major Science/Tech/Medical publishers. Their business model works like this:
1) Sign up a "famous" editor. Someone who is known throughout the field for their research and is respected by his/her peers. This person is expected to do all the editing, peer-review, managment, etc... but usually makes little to no money considering the amount of time spent. Most editors hold their position for prestige not money.
2) Accept submissions from authors (usually researchers, grad students, and teachers). Convince them that they must "publish or perish". Authors receive free reprints of their article once it is published. But, other than that they must sign a waiver and do not get compensated for their work.
3) Publish articles in a Journal 6-12 times a year and sell to schools/libraries on a sliding scale. So far, the publisher has hardly paid a cent for the content. The Editors, Authors, and Peer-reviewers made little or no money on this. The Publisher sent the journal to Malaysia to be typset and printed so it cost them next to nothing. Now, they go to library "A" and offer a subscription for $4,000. Then, they go to college "B" and offer the SAME journal for $8,000.
During the last couple of years there has been some backlash from the libraries and the editors. People are asking: "Why do I have to pay this much money?". Editors have told the publishers to screw off and started their own, private, online Journals. The Publishers are afraid that their revenue stream is going away. They are nothing but middlemen (just like the RIAA) and they are becoming obsolete. Now, it looks like they are trying to sue to keep their jobs!
I used to work for Reed-Elsevier subsidiary LEXIS-NEXIS. They bought LEXIS-NEXIS from Mead and paid off the debt in 8 months! R-E is a huge multi-national corporation that is responsible only to an Anglo-Dutch board. None of its subsidiaries are publicly traded in the US. While there has been concern about consolidation in telecom, entertainment, cable, etc., no one has been watching how much information is being tied up by a few corporations.
LEXIS is the public information side. For example, they provide UCC, real estate, and court records. NEXIS provides magazine, newspaper, and journal data. R-E also owns many other hardcopy magazine and journal publishers of science, law, medicine, and general interest in North America and Europe.
When I worked for them in the late '90s, they had the third largest dial-up network, behind AT&T and MCI. At that time, LEXIS-NEXIS's CEO heard about the Internet for the first time. He was rumored to ask, "Can we buy this Internet thing?" Obviously he considered a network of free information as competition to LEXIS-NEXIS.
I think this issue is closely related to what journals researchers choose to publish their results in. I for one refuse to publish in for profit journals unless they make their contents available for free on the Internet.
If enough researchers adopted this attitude we could get rid of companies like elsevier science which not only makes a profit by charging researchers exhorbitant prices to read their journals but also actively squelches other free publications.
So please do not submit articles to, peer review articles for, or in any other way help such for-profit journals.
And it also is OK for Disney to sell a things based on the public domain like Treasure Island, but not OK for others to use the Mickey Mouse stories which should now be public domain. We certainly wouldn't want someone to be placing Mickey Mouse in a futuristic setting...like Futurama.
Well that decision certainly is short-sighted. Obviously the publishers that stand to make money from the absence of the free Pubscience web site got a receptive audience in the current U.S. administration. If you don't like it and you live in the U.S., then you have the right to vote for a different administartion next time.
There's a growing discrepancy between the costs of providing information over the internet and what has traditionally been charged to libraries for access to research journals. Ask your librarian sometime what some of those journal subscriptions run; many are over $1000 per year.
If the government won't act as a way for citizens to pool their resources to obtain a valuable service at a low price, then perhaps it would be a good idea for people to pool contributions to purchase a co-located server on a fat pipe somewhere and start stocking it with searchable research papers.
As far as that goes, many of the big publishing houses have gotten free professional reviewers for the journal articles, merely because the university tenure process has been critically linked to how many articles a researchers publishes in those journals.
If the free site could get enough "expert anonymous moderators" to help rank articles and enough good content to be noticed, things would start to take off by themselves.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Well, it looks like the wayback machine isn't of too much help: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.osti.gov/
It would be nice though, if someone could just put the site back online at a different address...
This really saddens me, shouldn't we as a civilization be striving to make as many things as free and accessible to the children of the Earth as possible? Don't people understand that money truly is the root of all evil?
I just hope that from now authors of those scientific and technical articles will make more money.
If I count correctly part of the former PubScience's audience will now pay to read such articles so it have to result in more money for article authors ... but ...
... but ... they may as well end up like Stan Lee (Stan Lee Sues Marvel Comics).
hany
If there were articles on the DOE's site that are not available anywhere else, couldn't the DOE ditch the rest and keep just those available. At the very least, it would irritate the money-grubbing assholes who wanted the entire site shutdown.
The short answer: Yes. The DOE should have only removed the offending articles and left the rest of the database intact.
I have written many articles that were in the OSTI database. As a matter of fact, at my organization publication entails, as a matter of institutional and DOE policy, sending a draft copy of each article or report to the library for OSTI dissemination. Frankly, I'd always wondered about the legality of this, given that in order to publish the article in scientific journals I need to sign a copyright transfer form that assigns all copyright rights to the publisher.
Upon transferral, the publishing company owns all rights to the work in question and to any "revised or expanded derivative works based on the Work." (I'm quoting from the IEEE copyright form in front of me). In my reading, the reports I send to the OSTI database would constitute a derivative work based on the Work submitted for publication. The publisher's request that the DOE not disseminate this material for free is, I'm afraid to say, their legal prerogative, however much you or I may disagree with the principle of their doing so. However, I would argue that no single publisher has the right to shut down the entire database; they only may exercise rights over their own copyrighted works and not over any other work in the database.
If I were running the DOE, I would have played hardball with the publisher: I would have requested the publisher to list, article by article, specifically those works that they own the copyrights to and then excise only those articles from the database (after they've demonstrated their ownership of the copyrights) while leaving the rest intact. Then, DOE policy would be modified to require all DOE-supported research to be published in only those journals that authorize OSTI dissemination of the work. Moreover, "public service" (i.e., editorial service or referee duties) for "for-profit" publishing companies (defined as those companies which do not permit OSTI dissemination) would not be permitted by employees who bill their time to DOE grants and contracts.
Such a boycott would honor both the legal copyrights of the scientific work as well as the notion of public access to taxpayer-funded research. In time, as other scientific organizations (NSF, NIH, etc.) follow suit, publishers who choose to exercise their copyrights in this fashion can expect to become progressively more marginalized by the community at large. The government has already, in most cases, footed 99.9% of the cost of producing a scientific work. Retaining the right to list the work in the OSTI database should not be too much to ask.
All cries of corporate fascism are a nifty combination of class warfare and attacking a straw man. Class warfare is obviously implied. The straw man is that corporations are made up of people, but are not easilly seen as people.
1) Class Warfar is not inherently implied. There are rich people who are not running corporations (royalty, hedonistic heirs, etc.), and their are quite poor people grunting away in the back rooms of many large corps, eagerly persuing corporate interests over human one's in their quest to rise up the promotional latter. The issue is orthogonal to economic and social class.
2) There is no strawman. Corporations are indeed made up of people, but so too was the apparatus of Stalinist Russia, the Khmere Rouge, the Tea and Opium monopolies of the British Empire, and more recently the Taliban and Al Q'aeda. The point that an organization, sinister or otherwise, is comprised of human beings is completely orthogonal to the question of whether or not that organization (or class of organizations) is detrimental or not, much less to the question I raised as to whether living under corporate fascism, as we apparently do today, is a good thing, or a terrible thing that we must, sooner or later, address (preferably sooner and peacefully, but one way or another, sooner or later, it will be addressed, and the longer we wait, the more likely the correction is to be violent one, something no one in their right mind would wish for. Alas, I am not terribly optimistic.)
3) Corporations have a very dehumanizing effect on people. In the context of business people routinely engage in character assassination, routinely make decisions destructive to human life (Montanto's poisoning of well water in southern US towns during the 1990s) and then exachange memos on how to deal with the legal and political fallout if and when they are caught, routinely make decisions that destroy lives for a marginal improvement in their bottom lines, etc. etc. Activities that people as individuals would never consider in any other context are routine, accepted, even encouraged in the corporate context, generally with the "it's business" justification attached.
If people in a corporate setting cease to behave as people, and instead behave as something less than human toward the fellow man, is it really inappropriate to criticize that, to point it out, and to point the finger at the apparent cause? And, when those same organizations wield undue influence over our government, completely subverting and negating our already fragile democracy in the process, is it really appropriate to dismiss that simply because the organization "is made up of people?"
Let me know what you propose that will replace corporations and provide the same or better services at the same or lower cost.
This is a false dichotomy. We are not faced with merely two choices: live under the current corporate fascist system that has supplanted our democracy, or do without corporations, and industrial products, altogether. Indeed, it can be shown that industrial products can exist without corporations, and that corporations can exist without supplanting the democractic governments beneath which they operate. The fact that this is no longer the case in the United States and western Europe does not mean it never was the case, nor does it mean it is an ideal impossible to achieve.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Where do the PubSCIENCE citations come from?
PubSCIENCE citations come from two sources: 1) participating publishers and information intermediaries maintaining citation collections based on agreements negotiated with OSTI, and 2) the nearly one million DOE Energy Science and Technology Database journal citations maintained by OSTI, comprising one of the largest compendia of energy related bibliographic citations available electronically.
How is PubSCIENCE populated?
OSTI is negotiating agreements with selected scientific journal publishers and information intermediaries to obtain announcement citations and compile them into the PubSCIENCE searchable database. This database includes hyperlinks from the citations to the publishers' servers where the full text article is available. Options to view the full-text will depend on the publisher. Users or their organizations or libraries make arrangements with publishers to subscribe to journals or obtain site licenses. All fee-based arrangements to view the full-text at the publisher's site are the responsibility of the users.
How does PubSCIENCE help the user?
This service saves the user time-consuming research through many individual journals, eliminates inefficient searching through individual Web sites, allows access to journal information 24 hours a day for 365 days a year, and links directly to the publisher's doorstep to obtain the full-text. PubSCIENCE is an excellent example of how modern information technology can provide significant savings in time and money.
Organizationally, it saves the government or any other employer of researchers money in two important ways. First, PubSCIENCE provides efficient desktop access to needed information, thus increasing researcher productivity. Secondly, PubSCIENCE avoids duplication of research. R&D efforts are less likely to be duplicated because scientists can more easily become aware of research already conducted or ongoing.
Why invest in a project like this?
The Department's mandate is to provide for the accessibility and dissemination of scientific knowledge that was created as the result of government sponsored R&D. The resources that are actually invested are very small as the citations provided by the journal publishers are freely provided at no charge. Many professional societies who wish to engage their publications in electronic commerce see this as the trend for the future. PubSCIENCE will not only facilitate access to scientific knowledge developed through government sponsored research, but will also expand use and access to broader peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What is the future of PubSCIENCE?
OSTI will continue to expand the collaboration through negotiations with other journal publishers and provide the DOE research community and the public with access. PubSCIENCE represents a unique partnership between the Federal government and the public/private journal publishers focused on facilitating good science by providing access to peer reviewed scientific and technical literature. This represents a major milestone in the goal of "Bringing Science to the Desktop" through the application of Web-based information technology.
[go here for the complete text: http://web.archive.org/web/20011007040328/pubsci.
what's to prevent a private non-profit organization from taking up the reigns of PubSCIENCE?
Is anyone writing to their Congress People about this? That seems to be better than to just "bitch and moan" on /.
there is something wrong with the government taking money from a company in the form of tax dollars to create a competing product,...
I don't think a local government police force is wrong even though it competes against private security firms.
What is the reason for the prime mark (single quote) following the word "publishers" in both the blurb and the headline for this story? Does it signify something that I'm missing?
(unrelated, but something else I noticed yesterday... why is the word "by" inserted after each page number in the page-navigation header/footer thingy for the comments? e.g. "(1) | 2 by | 3 by | 4 by | 5 by")
myselfmusic
1) The appropriate person is listed as a member of the Board of Directors
2) Thank them for their support of scientific research
3) STATE THE ACTION THAT YOU DISLIKE
4) Politely urge them to take action
5) Politely notify them that you will post this on their community web sites that you post to (if you do)
With that out of the way:
Novell is represented by Gary Schuster. Novell Invester Relations is 'ptroop@novell.com'
Sun Microsystems is represented by Michael Morris. Sun invester relations is 'investor-relations@sun.com'
Real Networks is represented by Kelly Jo MacArthur. Real's contact is 'public_relations@real.com'
NetSchools, now owned by Plato, is represented by Kathy Hurley. The contact is 'meredith@netschools.com'
Citrix is represented by Traver Gruen-Kennedy. The contact is 'eric.armstrong@citrix.com'
Borland is represented by Dale Fuller. I used my corporate contact, so look up your own.
Thompson is represented by Edward A. Friedland. I used a friend who works within Thompson, so look up your own contact.
Oracle is represented by Daniel Cooperman. The contact is 'investor-us@oracle.com'
Please, use them only for good.
frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pubsci.osti.go v/
You just need to use pubsci's original url not the "You Killed Kenny" URL.
if I had a research GRANT which is derived from taxes and needed information that used to be available for free, now i'll have to pay a private company for this same information. So let's say the government makes or funds the research paper, now that paper will only be available from a private agency??
So you pay taxes to do the research and then you pay again to see the results. Too bad freedom of information act doesn't apply to private clearinghouses.
meh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remember, Microsoft forced the NSA to stop development of SELinux for that very reason.
photosMy Photostream
A. Government laws, regulations, and policies should facilitate public access to public information by encouraging a diversity of sources, including the government, library community and private sector information industry, to offer or provide access to such information.
D. Government should not use scarce resources to disseminate an information product that has the likelihood of duplicating other current or near future products in the market that reasonably achieve an agency's dissemination objective.
Nothing like consistency (unless it interferes with our cash making abilities) From SIAA's own Principles of Gov't Information.
I am afraid you are incorrect. The proper cause of action is to eliminate the use entirely of (or minimize any expenditures on if that's not possible) any of their products. True, boycots rarely work, but talking to these imbeciles has never and will never work. With a concious choice at least you can make a tangible and measurable difference to them however small that be, I only wish slashdot crowd was less fragmented and as radical in their actions as they seem to be in their use of words.
I also found this particularly outrageous, as it seems that law is one of the few products for which government is the only supplier. I haven't seen Microsoft Constitution XP (although they're probably trying...).
There are companies that publish works by Shakespere. Thus, any free publications of Shakespere cut into their profits. There are companies that produce Bibles. Thus, anyone who gives away the Bible is cutting into their profits. Since the rights in the Constitution have been basically given away to corporations anyway, it seems only fair that only they should have the exclusive right to publish them. It's only fair that only those who actually use the rights therein should have to pay for them, and conversely only those who actually pay for them should have the rights.
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
These sound like exactly the same people that want to deny opensource licenses to software created with taxpayer dollars. How long before they go after opensource in general?
Linux is keeping Microsoft from making that last 5% of the profit they could be squeezing out and is therefore Communist, anti-Capitalist, anti-American, and evil. Lets outlaw sites like Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Heck lets shutdown Ibiblio and get rid of public literature, research, and software all in one punch.
Welcome to America. Corporate greed and political corruption next 3000 miles. Please have a credit reference ready before departing the train.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
But there's a hell of a lot of cases of food poisoning,
Wow, that's an impressive claim for something over which there's really no public outcry. Could you provide a link or a reference about this supposed epidemic of wacky foreigners poisoning our little Lebensborn?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, yes, the testing requirements are rather draconian. But then again, does anyone remember thalidomide? It was rushed through approval in Europe, but the only victims in the US were those involved in the initial safety trials. (This was mostly due to the efforts of the FDA chief at the time.)
There's a reason that drug approval is so expensive here. It's not something you'd want to cut corners on.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
From this attitude, any of the distributed computing initiatives like Folding@Home run the risk of being shut down for depriving IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, or even Dell (where the D stands for disposable, but I digress) the opportunity to profit from researchers' computing needs.
Things are severely out of whack when goodwill and generosity are no longer virtues, but obstacles to profit. Society is dead; long live the corporation <grumble> ...
The Seventh Rule: Take others more seriously than yourself, particularly when you are leading them.
$15 to $45 per article!? Why bother with the middleman? Just send your contributions to the:
Save the Anonymous Coward Fund
P.O. box 1337
the beach across from 22 Rip Off Way
Puerto Plata
Dominican Republic
The constitution also doesn't say anything about the state funding universities. If there were no public schools, I couldn't get a higher education, and neither could a whole lot of other people. Are you going to tell me that we should all just resign ourselves to a life of burger-slinging because we can't affort forty grand a year?
(Never mind that the increased earning power the graduates have pay the state back tenfold at the least. Investing in education is a good thing. It makes sense. It's good for the people.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This actually is a continuing trend. Many of the major journals in the biological sciences have been raising their rates for many years, so as that libraries can only afford to pruchase a subset of them. This ends up with the results of publicly funded research only being available to schools with adequate funding, draaging down the entire fields collaborative efforts. All of this is not fully lost on the field A few heavywieghts have called for a blacklist of journals and companies that do not make their information available. Sadly, prestige is the main driving factor for researchers, fo the microsofts of the scientific community ( Cell, Science, Nature) still can gouge us all. In response,Kirschner, varmus and others have set up a few public e-journals later this year) to be elite journals that are available to all. Whether this actualy works is another story.
The government uses tax money to support research and then publishes the results to the public for free. Now the researchers have to pay, using their grant money from the government to pay private companies what the government provided internally. Now the tax payer is still paying for research but we are paying more to greedy information hordes.
Euphemism, what is that a euphemism for something.
This is just another case of the Bush administration catering to big business interests with zero regard for the individual taxpayer. Everyone write your congressperson and senator NOW! It only takes a minute and will tell them to give us back that which we rightfully have paid for through our taxes. Marc
I totally resent being asked/forced to pay tax money for this information to be amassed and compiled, only to have private interests demand that I pay to receive that same info. Why do taxpayer sponsored programs always seem to end up with the main beneficiaries being corporate interests, rather than those of taxpayers?
Why isn't there a group or organization for publishing scientific papers for free? It seems that this is exactly what the internet was designed for in the first place, so what happened? Would it be that difficult to create a central repository for research papers, where scientists can submit their research, have it peer-reviewed, and published online for everyone to see? Is it really necessary to have a commercial publisher touching any government-funded research? Or is someone forcing scientists to publish their papers through these publishing companies? This seems like exactly the kind of thing the open-source community should not only be discussing, but doing. Hell, take 1/10th the time and energy spent on M$ bashing on slashdot and you could probalby have something running in six months. It would probably not even be that difficult to get a sizeable amount of government funding for something like this. Is there any reason it wouldn't work? Has it already been done, and scientists are just using the old publishers out of ignorance? Any comments?
No, no. Frob is right. Embarassed for not saying so myself, but I was steamed.
These people are generally on our side. Look at the other things they have done. In fact, we are their constituency, and they are part of our community. They should understand, and listen.
Milo
Everyone seems to be terribly insensed, that the goventment will no longer be providing these documents for "free" to everyone.
News flash. The government doesn't really provide ANYTHING for free. We all pay for everything the government does, with taxes. And when the government does things, typically it does it in a horrifically inefficient manner.
My basic rule of thumb, is that the government should exist to do ONLY those functions that cannot be done in a reasonable manner at all by private companies. The primary purpose of government, should be to protect citizens from others. Virtually any other function is either unnecessary completely (saving citizens from themselves aka war on drugs etc) or better done by the private sector.
Police, Military, SEC (maybe), Judicial System, are all valid functions of government. The bulk of what the government does, to me falls under the "it shouldn't" category.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Here in New York restaurants have gotten away with having almost all the street vendors shut down or regulated out of existence because it was "unfair" for some poverty income immigrant pooling the money of twenty relatives to sell tasty kebobs on a street corner and undercut the prices of snotty wealthy restaurants charging airport-style prices for food that customers (like me) didn't want anyway.
I live in a city (Mexico City) where street vendors get away with ANYTHING that they want. It has become and nightmare for neighbors and formal commerce. These guys not only take street corners, they literally block entire streets on given dates. Cynical politicians ignore and sometimes even encourage this kind of behaivior, knowing that it will bring them votes next elections (of street vendors who have grouped in mob style unions).
Want free electricity? Sure. How about neverminding basic health sanitation? Thats a joke! Taxes? Those are only paid by the snobs and rich. And that little house you bought, well, it has basically lost 50% of its value due to the market that comes and goes on your street, blocking your entrance, and making it imposible to use your car on certain days of the week.
I'll take NYC regulations against anarchic non regulated commerce. It's not that I advocate monopolistic activietes, but without smart and enforced commerce regulations and city ordinances, things can become anarchic quite easily.
My other OS is the MCP!
Who is the biggest consumer of scientific
literature? Libraries at (public and private)
universities. Who pays the library bills at
public universities? The taxpayer. You will
be paying *more* now, since you're getting the
same information, but more money is ending up
in Elsevier's pockets.
Does this mean I'd have a shot at picking a government-based service, creating a business that provided the same service, and then lobbying to have the government-based service shut down by arguing unfair competition?
Just as MIT opened its class syllabus to the world for the sake of the progress of all mankind, we should hope that great organizations like MIT will step in where there is both a market failure (inability to deliver value anywhere near cost) and a government failure (corrupt privatization resulting in unnecessary rents on research paid for by the taxpayers of various countries). :)
It would be a great service for an institution like MIT to devote a computer science project to the development of a modern scientific publishing site. This, after all, was why the web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the first place. With Google-Like technology (and perhaps their active help) an effective low cost indexing system could be developed as a first step, and emphatically set up as a free public resource in direct competition with those publishers who are abusing the scientific community (not to mention graduate students and their parents).
The global university system has a tremendous amount to gain financially from such a website, especially if the peer review function and its great prestige were to be transfered to such a modern, inexpensive, open, and democratic forum.
It's about time that this rent seeking corruption and abuse of every school, scientist, and student in the world of research be ended by obsolescence. Scientists of the world - Unite
People talk about the problem of the "digital divide". Well here it is, front and center. $40 per article means the average student would have to work 5 hours just to read one article if her school isn't wealthy, and if it is then the school itself is giving away millions of dollars yearly to an obsolete process which destroys economic value.
Such a project might take a few years to build up, a decade to gain the kind of prestige that would make it a viable alternative platform, but it could go a lot quicker if the major research institutions would get behind it. The universities have presses, after all, and these could do the paper publishing of the new journals for situations where hardcopy was valuable enough to justify cost. But a serious competitive effort like this could do a lot to end this financial abuse. Let Peter Schumpeter's "gales of creative destruction" destroy the business models of those whose cost structures are so incompetent that they want to charge $40 per article, and we will all be better off.
So let me ask slashdot readers a question. Does anyone know who at MIT was behind the policy of putting all the class syllabi on the web at not charge? Whoever those individuals were, we need to find out and let them know about this issue, because not only is it critical to the maintenance of a scientific commons and economic fairness, it could also save the large research institutions millions in political rents for the knowledge that they themselves produce and consume.
So what are the non American sites?
Canada, England Germany, France, India and China should be
in the game.
Many small researchers are going under because they can't afford the patent costs ; now they can't afford the R+D.
That would give another country the we dont recognise your patent because it was not published enough/obscure excuse.
The real downside is that potential badpersons will get their web info from whereever, visit libraries etc, rather than one controlled and traceable host, think about it, real dumb.
If you think such villians will pay $15 -40 a pop, you are wrong.
Now same law enforcement officials get to fly to all exotic countries. Hey, maybe this idea was to boost the US airline industry with first class tickets.
It's stupid that all these companies (defence, drug, publishing etc. benifit from the resources of the goverment (through publically funded research and projects done by universities and darpa etc), yet try to limit access to this information for their own simple greed. It is a sham that people fall for this scam, the example that reserchers have to basicaly do everything (typesetting etc)for these scientific publications and then pay to have their work published is a total capitalistic orwellian fantasy even bill gates would have trouble dreaming up...we now live in the internet age, it's about time this publishing stuff was put out on the web by the reaserchers themselves, we don't need a bunch of companies claiming ownership to the publishing process...
The American government has determined in all of its infinitesimal wisdom (what can you expect from a government led by a shrubbery ("Ni!")?) that large corporations are better than small ones and that almost any corporation is better than any individual (unless the individual has a whole s--tload of money).
Not entirely a new thing though - check out Tom Paxton's song "I'm changing my name to Chrysler" from which I quote the follwoing lines :
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
and should someone go broke, become unemployed, have to live on social security or whatever as a result of this idiocy, they can always take this hint (also from Mr. Paxton):
You can eat dog food! You really ought to try it!
You can fricassee it! You can deep fry it!
Flip it on over, eat it any way.
Eat along with Rover - three times a day!
For those for whom the name Tom Paxton is not entirely familiar, his music is likely to be (at least in once case) something sitting dormant in your memory, waiting to ambush you - here's the chorus from what is probably his most familiar song :
It went "Zip" when it moved,
And "Pop" when it stopped,
And, "Whirrr" when it stood still.
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will.
Well, it is wandering along toward the toy season, innit?
sorry, pet peeve.
This is a perfect example of having your priorities wrong. When a government puts the profit of corporations ahead of public good, something is very wrong.
Science progresses through the free echnage of information. Commercial scientific publishers are just profiteers. In the days of the Internet, we don't need them (Elsevier is the worst of all).
Let's just boycott them.
- Anonycous Moward
1. Authors/employers retain all proprietary rights in any process, procedure, or article of manufacture described in the Work.
4. In the case of a Work performed under a U.S. Government contract or grant, the IEEE recognizes that the U.S. Government has royalty-free permission to reproduce all or portions of the Work, and to authorize others to do so, for official U.S. Government purposes only, if the contract/grant so requires.
6. Although authors are permitted to re-use all or portions of the Work in other works, this does not include granting third-party requests for reprinting, republishing, or other types of re-use. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office must handle all such third-party requests.
How can these terms be used to keep you from publishing your work, as distinct from the formated work, in other papers? It looks like you still own your work, and may quote it verbatim. Am I missing something there? Why do they encourage folks to publish themselves on the web? I know that other journals and groups do try to keep you from publishing elsewhere. Do they all use the same language as seen in the IEEE form?
In the end, I have to admit that copyright transfer is a strange way of granting someone permision to publish your article and the potential for abuse is large.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What I find even more surprising/disturbing is what is being done at www.umi.com. The link is especially pertinent to those of you out there who have written or are going to write a dissertation that is filed away at your University's library. If you have already written a Ph.D. dissertation, go ahead and see if your dissertation is listed. If you've just recently written it and it is listed, most likely it is also available for download at a price! Now, mind you, none of that money goes to YOU the one who researched, wrote, stayed up late hours of the night to ponder and rewrite! Every last dime probably goes to UMI (and their partners). I don't know what sort of questionable business contracts UMI has with your University's library or the Library of Congress, but I know someone out there is profiting from works that others so painstakingly prepared. This racket has yet to be fully scrutinized.
Lets make no mistake of it. The SIIA is as bad if not worse than MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft who are using bullying tactics to maintain their monopolistic grasp on a niche (but very important for the advancement of humankind) market. The information published by the scientific community wants to be free--why else would researchers write and publish THEIR work? The cost is now so restrictive, that those of us who should be benefiting and learning from the information (the lowly students) cannot afford to do so!
Graduate students make somewhere between $15,000 to $22,000 a year. Bear in mind that most journals cost somewhere from $100 to $200 (or more) a year to subscribe. And for me, a grad student in the biomedical sciences, I scan somewhere around two dozen different journals. If I had to pay for access for all of these journals, I'd have to shell out somewhere between $2400 to $4800 a year--a good 10-25% of my salary!
I'm glad /. put this article on the frontpage because it outlines how dire the situation truly is. Forget about music and movies, this directly pertains to a lot of livelihoods and careers of /. readers--their bread-n-butter. At least ponder this: at a time when technology can easily publish scientific material, why are we allowing these large publishers to hoard and monopolize OUR own work and making it difficult for us to access that material at the same time? (This is a rhetorical question, obviously; and I'm sure you have lots to say why we allow it. But really, the answer appears to be so simple, but so out of reach.)
Linux at home
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Why is this not mod funny?
My god...this is really pathetic... What are they going to go after next...public libraries (i can imagine..."yes...you need a site license to keep that book in the library and lend it out...")? Free E-book libraries? ARE THEY GOING TO TRY AND FIND A WAY TO AUDIT OUR BRAINS!?!?!?!?!
If a group does research, their results belong to them, and the information that they find will be their property, regardless of what other group has "similar results"...right? This is an outrage....knowledge should be accessable to the general public...especially if the group that finds it is offering it. This is an outrage.
izm
In a DS9 eppisode Quark had to pay to find out what law he has broken.
I can see this..
Police officers with a cash box so you can pay 50 cents to find out your tail light was broken.
TV News being sued for thousands of dollers over copyright infrengment for discussing a new law.
and what a way to sillence protesters than to use shrinkwrap liccenses.
"Sorry but you can't protest it unless you know what it is.
If you know what it is you already agreed to NOT protest it.
Unless you pirated the text.."
I don't actually exist.
I think the exact opposite is true,...if companies can not protect their R&D investments from their competitors, they won't spend the type of money that need to be spent (or take the risks that need to be taken) to continue technological progress.
Face it, large corporations (driven by market forces), not academia, have become the driving force behind technological advancement. Academia simply can not produce the inceasingly large funds required as technology research becomes prohibitively expensive.
Of course, I am playing devil's advocate to some extent, the truth probably lies somewhere between us both.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating
his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test", said
the outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the
toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too".
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...