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."
The article doesn't say the DOE was stealing the material. Instead it "amounted to improper government-funded competition with commercial information services. ". This sounds to me more like if I started charging people for information that they could get for free, and then claimed that the people providing the free versions were infringing on my rights to profit from it.
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
The government paid for a lot of the research, and had a legal right under copyright law. The government did not pay for Spiderman, and have no legal rights it as intellectual property.
Is a list of SIIA members. Its important that we know who we are dealing with.
This is actually quite common IRL as well, businesses that set up around a military base (to leech off the base personel, no less) bitch and moan that on base, people with a military ID do not have to pay sales tax and try to bri...err...coer...err... lobby to force sales tax on base.
FYI: At least in the food part of it, there is a refrigeration fee or someshit. It's still less than sales tax though last time I checked.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
PubMed actually works like a search engine for articles, but you have to go to the publisher's web site to read the paper. They cannot get any better advertising. A commersial version of PubMed would by necessity draw fewer eyes, so it is in the interest of publishers to keep it free, which is why I think they will never be interested in shutting it down.
Reality or nothing.
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
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
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
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 $20 for a reprint, and a subscription is literally tens of thousands of dollars a year. Remember - they didn't do the work, or pay for the research, or even pay the article reviewers.
So this nonsense about "the government paying for something than can be provided privately" is nonsense. The government has paid for 99% of it already, these companies want to profiteer on the back of those government expenditures.
If the government is funding the research, should the citizens have open access to the results?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I've never worked with IEEE. Give me some inside juice. The terms look beter than most on the surface.
Peer review is part of active research and should be thought of as part of any research position. It keeps you up to date and sharpens your brain, kind of like Slashdot but there are fewer trolls.
The burden of clerical work is a different and unrelated issue. You should have an expert at digital publishing who can take your plain text, raw data and notes on equations, and turn them into decent looking papers on the web and on paper trough Apache, LaTex, DX and any other useful system. Secrataries should be up to this task. Anything else is wasteful of real research time.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Citeseer is one of the best free online Computer Science digital libraries. If you are ever doing research in CS, check out Citeseer first!
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
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.
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