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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!
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<*))))><
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.
I don't mind paying to see a movie, but if i have to start paying to have information that should be publicly avaiable to any researcher then we are limiting the brains that could contribute to better development. Hell... thinking about it, that's maybe why there are so many spell checking errors in slashdot, you probably have to pay to have access to spellchecking information.
rm -rf /home/leia
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!
> 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
- Publishers Attack Free Government Sites
- Publishers' Attack on Free Government Sites
The form, as written, merely states that many publishers own something called "Attack Free Government Sites." I suppose that means that publishers own government websites which sponsor nonviolence?There are many publishers who are attacking free government sites.
This article is detailing an attack by many publishers on free government sites.
At any rate, it needs some fixing up.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The worst part is, we (taxpayers) will pay either way, since a *LOT* of research is gov funded anyway. So what LeDuc is really saying is, "it's fairer for the gov to give *US* the money that they would be spending on the website". Oh, I'll bet the website cost less to run than the revenue generated for access to the articles...
Jon
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
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.
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 ----
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.
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.
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.
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
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