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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
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property seems to rely heavily on restricting access to existing information instead of increasing access to previously-unpublished information, but I'll leave someone else to get flamed by the mindless defenders of privatization right or wrong.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.
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?
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."
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.
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
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...