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!

Here

[Ann Coulter]

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

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?