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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."
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
Just like we're not allowed to sell things for less than they cost,
Huh? That's not true, and also, it's irrelevant. The site was shut down because the gov't isn't allowed to compete with private companies/people.
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property seems to rely heavily on restricting access to existing information instead of increasing access to previously-unpublished information, but I'll leave someone else to get flamed by the mindless defenders of privatization right or wrong.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.
Exactly my thoughts.
Doesn't a free market mean that you can "sell" your product at any price you see fit? Even if it means that you charge nothing for it.
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!
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".
I don't recall anywhere the right to have any and all research which "could" have application in the next decade developed and paid for by the population as a whole.
Beyond that, the main reason the smaller revenue drugs aren't getting developed is because of the ridiculous amount of money the FDA extorts to get them approved. Don't make it impossible to make a profit on a $10 million a year drug and you just might see more of them being developed.
Yes, the whole sentence seemed to have been written by a barely literate person. I had to read it a couple of times and mentally put the comma back in, and look at the article for context to see if the apostrophe was right. It would be nice if you could trust the sentence to be correct, but in fact you can't, and have to read the article to see if it says what the sentence seems to imply.
"That's not writing, that's typing."
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.
I'd go even further. You or I probably could and would pay for private seucrity if the government did not provide it. If the alternative was for us and our families to be at the mercy of robbers and murderers, we'd find a way to pay. There would be a private market in security, except that by providing this service for free, the government has destroyed the market.
Which in this case is a good thing.
While certain firms would benefit in a wild west scenario, private firms as a whole would not because of the atmosphere of lawlessness and theivery that would result. While government is by nature an inefficient provider of goods and services, ignoring the existence of an enormous shared public interest in establishing a lawful society means that leaving security completely to the private sector is a bad idea. The same goes for education, and perhaps health care.
Now, of course, the government can contract public services out to private firms. This means that the public specifies the nature of the public good to be provided and leaves the details of implementation to private firms. In many instances this is the best apporach, although perhaps not in the case of police services, where there is important public issues in the all the various aspects of the way that the services are provided.
It is not enough to say that the government has destroyed the opportunity for some private firms to make money selling information. You should have to show it is in the public interest for the government to get out of the business of offering information to its citizens.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
There's nothing magical about government that makes unprofitable research easier for them than for a nonprofit organization.
Oh yes there is. The government has the enormous power to require you to pay money to them, whereas a nonprofit does not.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Answer me this honestly: do you think that the general population is well informed, educated and rational enough to be trusted the voluntary funding of something that doesn't bring them salty snacks, beer, faster cars and entertainment with big exlosions and titties RIGHT NOW?
No. Same goes for public libraries, education and health care, probably for the police and rescue services as well. The moron majority doesn't want to fund them until the minute they need them and that means that, on average, they will never get funding.
Cynical, yes. Elitist, yes. Yet what I see every day confirms this. Mob rules.
The owls are not what they seem
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!
Springer-Verlag actually requires you to sign over the copyright. The copyright! You're not licensing the work to them to publish, but actually giving it away. (In return, you get the "privilege" to purchase a copy at 30% off.) Back in the day when publishers were really the only way to get others to see the work, maybe this was reasonable. With the internet, where I can easily share papers with other researchers at no cost to me, I think this situation is pretty fucked up. I definitely see a revolt in the near future...