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."

Comments

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[Trukster]

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.

Science publishers do not pay for the writers

[October_30th]

When it comes to scientific journals, publishers do not, in general, buy the rights to publish scientific articles.

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!

Re:Science publishers do not pay for the writers

[comic-not]

Well, yes and no. In most cases you have to cover extraordinary costs only (like printing full color images, or failing to write a concise paper). You do, however, pay dearly for the reprints, so the basic tenet is true. We scientists pay for the privilege to give away the copyright to our work. I'm content with that as long as it's not my personal money that picks the bill.

Oh, and consider choosing Nature instead of Science. Besides the higher impact factor, at least the last time around I didn't have to pay for the publication of my article there.

Here

[Ann Coulter]

Is a list of SIIA members. Its important that we know who we are dealing with.

Re:Here

[Shinobi]

Both Red Hat and Caldera are members.

Re:Here

[milo_Gwalthny]

More importantly, here is the list of their Board of Directors. This group is far too diverse to actually be agreeing on this. Some of the companies have to be in favor of more free content: it would improve their business of providing access to that content (I mean, what the hell is the SVP of NetSchools thinking?)

If you want to target companies for protest, start with those of the board of directors:

1. - Riverdeep Interactive Learning
2. 
   - Edge Technology Group
   - Oracle Corporation
   - AOL Time Warner
   - The Thomson Corporation
   - Borland Software Corporation
   - The McGraw-Hill Companies
   - Citrix Systems, Inc.
   - NetSchools Corporation
   - Bloomberg, L. P.
   - RealNetworks
   - Reed Elsevier Inc.
   - Sun Microsystems, Inc.
   - Novell, Inc.

Re:Not going after PubMed

[Lars Arvestad]

PubMed does not provide direct access to articles. Instead, you have lots of meta data about the publications, including author info, keywords, and most importantly, an abstract. Also, there are links out to the publishers' web sites.

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.

Whose paying?

[FuzzyDaddy]

The limited availability of information in scientific journals has always bothered me.

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?

tell me about the IEEE mafia, please.

[twitter]

IEEE seems to be good at sharing infromation, with a few small problems. See their terms and conditions for yourself. I don't see an an exclusivity clause, which would prevent you from publishing your work elsewhere if you chose. In fact they seem to encourage you to publish on your own and get the nature of the internet, as you would expect. The only thing that bothers me is a unilateral termination clause, where the IEEE can bar any researcher for any reason. That's a bit extreem for what ammounts to a public place, though I imagine that any site administrator should be able to block any malicious site to protect itself.

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.

Someone mod the parent post up!

[Jagasian]

Citeseer is one of the best free online Computer Science digital libraries. If you are ever doing research in CS, check out Citeseer first!

Re:Here are email addresses...

[Frobnicator]

Please use them kindly, stating that:

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.