Slashdot Mirror
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!
And so do programmers, web page designers, and bandwidth providers.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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.
I second that motion
man
No manual entry for
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.
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 - the private companies want to profit from government-funded research. If my tax dollars fund research, I want the results in the public domain, not sold by some company. They want you to pay twice for the same information!
Eh, where an earth did it say that?
Where does it say the publishers were paying for the material?
The jist I got from the article was that publishers charge for access to the materials and the goverment didn't, hence the site was shut down as it was competeing with the publishers. Not that PubScience was republishing the publishers material.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
>They want you to pay twice for the same information!
nah.. they don't care how much or how many times you pay.. as long as you pay them at least once.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
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!
The owls are not what they seem
Seems like more 'fair use' erosion to me.
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!
Is a list of SIIA members. Its important that we know who we are dealing with.
> 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
So does this mean that if Project Gutenberg were mirrored on a .gov site, book publishers could get it shut down?
Take it far enough and this could be ridiculous... this information is in the public domain and NO-ONE should be prevented from disseminating it.
Yet another example of corporate concerns overriding the cares of the little guy.
- 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!
If I own something I am entitled to offer it for sale at whatever price I choose. If I don't own it, I am not entitled to offer it for sale, period.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
You shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition.
While "Where y'at?" is common in New Orleans it is poor grammar. However with your enlightening addition to the slashdot.org comment section I'm extremely impressed and humbled by your obvious intellectual superiority over the previous poster.
Before coming to any conclusions, I'd like to hear what the *editors* of these publications think of this decision - NOT the companies reselling their articles.
The corporations are always trying to squeeze out money. Today free govt sites, tomorrow terrerisom insurance. oh wait, that's today also. I guess they will have a lot of time on their hands tomorrow to plan where to get money from next.
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
...as a programmer, I'd like to be free too :)
True warriors use the Klingon Google
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.
This is actually quite common IRL as well, businesses that set up around a military base (to leech off the base personel, no less) bitch and moan that on base, people with a military ID do not have to pay sales tax and try to bri...err...coer...err... lobby to force sales tax on base.
FYI: At least in the food part of it, there is a refrigeration fee or someshit. It's still less than sales tax though last time I checked.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
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.
The Government attacks free publishers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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
Yeah, hyphenation is good. :) Another version I hadn't thought of: Perhaps "free" was intended to be the verb. As in, a bunch of publishers had an attack which was able to free a bunch of government sites. That's exciting, no? Of course, then you've got disagreement in plurality (the official term for it evades me), so it would either have to be "Publishers' Attack Frees Government Sites" or "Publishers' Attacks Free Government Sites," so there are corrections to be made regardless. :)
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
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.
Well, you seem full of righteous anger, and that is a good thing. But you did not offer a solution.
Here is one: since this amounts to yet another sell out of the American public by its elected and appointed managers (politicians and bureaucrats), I suggest that the control loop (wherein the American people control its managers) is dysfunctional/incomplete.
The battle is not between us and Al Queda, or us and the corporations, but between us and our managers.
What we need is to elect politicians who have a serious grudge against govt and politicians, and hopefully these grudgeholders will institute punishments sever enough to deter this type of betrayal of the American people. Here is one possible deterrent: pass laws that allows the hanging politicians for this sort of bad behavior (selling out to corporations, etc).
If we start hanging politicians for this sort of behavior, I suggest we will get a lot less of it.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
I agree. The correct form would be:
Publishers' Attack Free Government Site's
Editors: plz fix k thx
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
As are: the Association of Public Television Stations (I'll hazard a guess that they are what they sound like), The Kermit Project, and the Association of Shareware Professionals.
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!
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.
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
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".
If you make something you own it. For the copy of the picture you're not selling me the picture, you're selling me a COPY of the picture. You made the copy (legally, as it's in the PD) and so you own the copy. Remember a few years ago a microsoft backed company went around buying up the exclusive digital reproduction rights for a load of famous (non-PD) images? If you want to sell me a digital copy of the Mona Lisa, I believe you now have to ask Bill's permission. Might be wrong on that though, can't remember exactly which ones they bought.
The list of grants is the same, either you compiled it, so you own the copyright and can sell it, or you got it from someone else who allowed you to copy it, again you own the physical copy. Of course if you copied it illegally (i.e. without copyright permission), you do not own it and cannot sell it. Pretty simple really.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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."
I don't think so. From the general appearance of things on the front page of Slashdot, you can only really reach one of two conclusions:
either...
1) There's an editorial rule to quote submissions exactly as submitted without making corrections
or...
2) The editors don't know squat about grammar.
It seems more like the former to me, really.
Recently the Open Channel Foundation did begin making it available free. Open Channel apparently hopes to fund itself by commercializing some software.
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.
Reading such a story really angers me. Next some companies shall say that public schools are unfair competition to private schools? That government funded healthcare (as many civilized states offer) hinders competition between private hospitals?
This makes me sick, if this is what capitalism is leading to, I don't want to be a part of it.
What such companies do is making the public only shift to radical left (seriously, I'm not at that level yet) and thus destroy themselves in the long run.
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 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.
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?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Perhaps the government should consider not taxing the life out of the country and making programs like this?
As well, once one of them has the information you're selling, what's to stop him/her from writing their own version of the information, basing it purely on the scientific facts contained within what you're selling, and giving it away to his/her friends for free?
I suppose you are one of the many that think that Linux will never make it in the commercial world because you can download it for free? Asside from that, I don't care what they do with it after they have paid me for it. That's all part of freedom. If they can, without any revenue stream, present it in a professional manner that would match mine... great! I'm going to continue to get good information and even sell it in practice. I doubt the fellows not getting paid could do that.
produce interesting new ideas and ways to physicall implement those ideas.
This I can certainly agree with. The thing is, not everyone really benefits from any of the information disseminated by the government. However, everyone is paying for it. That sounds an aweful lot like stealing to me. For instance, immagine the government paying millions of dollars to research a particular thing, then passed a law stating that it's use is prohibited. This happens all the time. A company can't just have you arrested for doing something to protect their revinue. They have to have a law passed. Government doesn't have to lobby. The just do.
private fiefdoms and state dictatorship
Greed is a powerful motivator. As a saying goes "The path to hell is paved with good intentions." It doesn't take long, as is evidenced by the socialization of the US since our good friend FDR took office, to ruin a good idea(the US government in this case). I really don't care what party anyone belongs to. I really don't care what invisible friend anyone subscribes to. You mess with my freedom, I'll kick you in the teeth.
"Editors ignore Slashdot."
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.
Right on! In other news, it is much fairer to charge students to enter public (taxpayer-funded) schools than it is to charge taxpayers the cost of maintaining the doors. And those damn drivers should have to pay a private company to get through intersections instead of having taxpayers pay for traffic signals on roads. Taxpayers might pay for all of these things, but we need to make sure that the actual users pay private companies for the right to use them. After all, the trivial cost of access is the real burden, not the research/development/construction/staffing/mainten ance costs...
Wayback Machine results for pubscience
Interesting that so many publishers are sponsors! Big Shrug!!!
Any act of aggression intended to alter the government policy pretty much makes you a terrorist.
Yes, Even if it's a policy of facilitating unfettered corruption.
Here's a suggestion for you and other irate Slashdot readers: LEARN as much as you can about politics. Aspire to know the top 50 lobbiests, where they get thier money and what they are getting in return. Find out what issues people really care about, and learn how to leverage thier concerns to care about your concerns. Go beyond hypothesis and speculation, and get the facts. Share your findings, make your findings compelling, share them with everybody.
When the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, there were hundreds of millions of Muslims who understood why...
We're about as understood as those radical enviromentalists, yet our issues are non-partisan that mainly address plain-vanilla corruption.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Al Queda delcared it will not be going after ClubMed. "Let the hethens drink themselves to STDs and early graves," claimed a source that wished to remain anymous.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The battle is not between us and Al Queda, or us and the corporations, but between us and our managers.
Um. Not quite. Much though I understand your sentiment (look at my post above to see just how pissed I am), one problem does not simply cancel out the other. There are any number of foul and destructive things in the world.
Our kleptocratic government/corporations are one problem.
Anti-progress violent reactionaries are another.
Just because there are dangerous sleaze here doesn't mean that the existence of dangerous sleaze elsewhere is somehow less real or urgent.
Yeah, it sucks. We're in a multifront war and we've handed the keys to our defense against one enemy to another enemy. Good thing the actual military is still on our side.
Oh, and by the way, simple answers like "just elect angry people with a grudge against the current power structure" is how the even worse tyrannies get created.
Look into the history of Nazi Germany. The Nazis said all sorts of things in the twenties and thirties that were very convincingly anti-corporate. Same for Mussolini and, *ahem*, Saddam Hussein.
No simple answers, folks. No quick fixes. You can't clean a two bedroom house in one step. We certainly can't clean up a three hundred person nation in one.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Since when does the U.S. government have an obligation not to compete with an existing commercial enterprise? This is literally saying that if I'm in the paving business, it's illegal for my local government to have a department of public works...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The U.S. government seems to be very inconsistent about providing public-domain information over the web. I wish they'd settle on a policy, hopefully of making everything I paid for wity my taxes freely available!
I didn't know about PubScience, but I have spent time trying to access USGS map data over the web. This data is a pain to find. The USGS has "business partners" who only make the data available for a fee. I generally have to track down the data state-by-state, from state-based agencies who make the data available for free (though they sometimes apply different licenses to the orignal USGS data), and some states aren't available.
In addition, I recently wanted to research the results of a class-action lawsuit on the U.S. Federal Courts website. It turns out that you can't do that easily. You have to register, wait 2 weeks for them to snail-mail you an access account, and if you look at too many pages (more than $10 worth), you get billed.
These agencies need a consistent data-distribution policy, and then with that, they'd be more immune to individual attacks by the SIIA and other deep-pocket lobby groups.
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.
Citeseer is one of the best free online Computer Science digital libraries. If you are ever doing research in CS, check out Citeseer first!
If it were a Canadian or Mexican company making the claim, then it would fall under NAFTA, but I don't think that a US Company can make a claim against the US Gov't under NAFTA. It holds jurisdiction on cross-border disputes, if I'm not mistaken.
i - This sig provided by
What's next? A private hospital suing to shutdown a government-run free public health clinic because it's competing with them?
11*43+456^2
Its really that simple. They don't contribute ANYTHING to the process, and they get tons of money from it.
The vast majority of scientists who did the research did so using government grants; the vast majority of scientists who did the reviews either did so for free or were being paid by government money (i.e., the government gives money to universities, as well as tax breaks).
Then, after all this is done with public money, they privitize the information, making US the taxpayers pay again for what we've already paid for.
Taxpayers pay alot of money to contribute to scientific research; they should be able to access the results, research papers, review papers, and abstracts free of charge.
Anything else is just crooked and unconstitutionally forces the taxpayer to pay again for what which (s)he already owns.
If ANY of the TAXPAYER's MONEY is used for the research or reviews, it should ALL be available to the taxpayers for free, in the public domain. If you don't want to make it available free, then you shouldn't use ANY government money.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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!
Because tha law forbids it.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
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.
Well that decision certainly is short-sighted. Obviously the publishers that stand to make money from the absence of the free Pubscience web site got a receptive audience in the current U.S. administration. If you don't like it and you live in the U.S., then you have the right to vote for a different administartion next time.
There's a growing discrepancy between the costs of providing information over the internet and what has traditionally been charged to libraries for access to research journals. Ask your librarian sometime what some of those journal subscriptions run; many are over $1000 per year.
If the government won't act as a way for citizens to pool their resources to obtain a valuable service at a low price, then perhaps it would be a good idea for people to pool contributions to purchase a co-located server on a fat pipe somewhere and start stocking it with searchable research papers.
As far as that goes, many of the big publishing houses have gotten free professional reviewers for the journal articles, merely because the university tenure process has been critically linked to how many articles a researchers publishes in those journals.
If the free site could get enough "expert anonymous moderators" to help rank articles and enough good content to be noticed, things would start to take off by themselves.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If there were articles on the DOE's site that are not available anywhere else, couldn't the DOE ditch the rest and keep just those available. At the very least, it would irritate the money-grubbing assholes who wanted the entire site shutdown.
The short answer: Yes. The DOE should have only removed the offending articles and left the rest of the database intact.
I have written many articles that were in the OSTI database. As a matter of fact, at my organization publication entails, as a matter of institutional and DOE policy, sending a draft copy of each article or report to the library for OSTI dissemination. Frankly, I'd always wondered about the legality of this, given that in order to publish the article in scientific journals I need to sign a copyright transfer form that assigns all copyright rights to the publisher.
Upon transferral, the publishing company owns all rights to the work in question and to any "revised or expanded derivative works based on the Work." (I'm quoting from the IEEE copyright form in front of me). In my reading, the reports I send to the OSTI database would constitute a derivative work based on the Work submitted for publication. The publisher's request that the DOE not disseminate this material for free is, I'm afraid to say, their legal prerogative, however much you or I may disagree with the principle of their doing so. However, I would argue that no single publisher has the right to shut down the entire database; they only may exercise rights over their own copyrighted works and not over any other work in the database.
If I were running the DOE, I would have played hardball with the publisher: I would have requested the publisher to list, article by article, specifically those works that they own the copyrights to and then excise only those articles from the database (after they've demonstrated their ownership of the copyrights) while leaving the rest intact. Then, DOE policy would be modified to require all DOE-supported research to be published in only those journals that authorize OSTI dissemination of the work. Moreover, "public service" (i.e., editorial service or referee duties) for "for-profit" publishing companies (defined as those companies which do not permit OSTI dissemination) would not be permitted by employees who bill their time to DOE grants and contracts.
Such a boycott would honor both the legal copyrights of the scientific work as well as the notion of public access to taxpayer-funded research. In time, as other scientific organizations (NSF, NIH, etc.) follow suit, publishers who choose to exercise their copyrights in this fashion can expect to become progressively more marginalized by the community at large. The government has already, in most cases, footed 99.9% of the cost of producing a scientific work. Retaining the right to list the work in the OSTI database should not be too much to ask.
All cries of corporate fascism are a nifty combination of class warfare and attacking a straw man. Class warfare is obviously implied. The straw man is that corporations are made up of people, but are not easilly seen as people.
1) Class Warfar is not inherently implied. There are rich people who are not running corporations (royalty, hedonistic heirs, etc.), and their are quite poor people grunting away in the back rooms of many large corps, eagerly persuing corporate interests over human one's in their quest to rise up the promotional latter. The issue is orthogonal to economic and social class.
2) There is no strawman. Corporations are indeed made up of people, but so too was the apparatus of Stalinist Russia, the Khmere Rouge, the Tea and Opium monopolies of the British Empire, and more recently the Taliban and Al Q'aeda. The point that an organization, sinister or otherwise, is comprised of human beings is completely orthogonal to the question of whether or not that organization (or class of organizations) is detrimental or not, much less to the question I raised as to whether living under corporate fascism, as we apparently do today, is a good thing, or a terrible thing that we must, sooner or later, address (preferably sooner and peacefully, but one way or another, sooner or later, it will be addressed, and the longer we wait, the more likely the correction is to be violent one, something no one in their right mind would wish for. Alas, I am not terribly optimistic.)
3) Corporations have a very dehumanizing effect on people. In the context of business people routinely engage in character assassination, routinely make decisions destructive to human life (Montanto's poisoning of well water in southern US towns during the 1990s) and then exachange memos on how to deal with the legal and political fallout if and when they are caught, routinely make decisions that destroy lives for a marginal improvement in their bottom lines, etc. etc. Activities that people as individuals would never consider in any other context are routine, accepted, even encouraged in the corporate context, generally with the "it's business" justification attached.
If people in a corporate setting cease to behave as people, and instead behave as something less than human toward the fellow man, is it really inappropriate to criticize that, to point it out, and to point the finger at the apparent cause? And, when those same organizations wield undue influence over our government, completely subverting and negating our already fragile democracy in the process, is it really appropriate to dismiss that simply because the organization "is made up of people?"
Let me know what you propose that will replace corporations and provide the same or better services at the same or lower cost.
This is a false dichotomy. We are not faced with merely two choices: live under the current corporate fascist system that has supplanted our democracy, or do without corporations, and industrial products, altogether. Indeed, it can be shown that industrial products can exist without corporations, and that corporations can exist without supplanting the democractic governments beneath which they operate. The fact that this is no longer the case in the United States and western Europe does not mean it never was the case, nor does it mean it is an ideal impossible to achieve.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Where do the PubSCIENCE citations come from?
PubSCIENCE citations come from two sources: 1) participating publishers and information intermediaries maintaining citation collections based on agreements negotiated with OSTI, and 2) the nearly one million DOE Energy Science and Technology Database journal citations maintained by OSTI, comprising one of the largest compendia of energy related bibliographic citations available electronically.
How is PubSCIENCE populated?
OSTI is negotiating agreements with selected scientific journal publishers and information intermediaries to obtain announcement citations and compile them into the PubSCIENCE searchable database. This database includes hyperlinks from the citations to the publishers' servers where the full text article is available. Options to view the full-text will depend on the publisher. Users or their organizations or libraries make arrangements with publishers to subscribe to journals or obtain site licenses. All fee-based arrangements to view the full-text at the publisher's site are the responsibility of the users.
How does PubSCIENCE help the user?
This service saves the user time-consuming research through many individual journals, eliminates inefficient searching through individual Web sites, allows access to journal information 24 hours a day for 365 days a year, and links directly to the publisher's doorstep to obtain the full-text. PubSCIENCE is an excellent example of how modern information technology can provide significant savings in time and money.
Organizationally, it saves the government or any other employer of researchers money in two important ways. First, PubSCIENCE provides efficient desktop access to needed information, thus increasing researcher productivity. Secondly, PubSCIENCE avoids duplication of research. R&D efforts are less likely to be duplicated because scientists can more easily become aware of research already conducted or ongoing.
Why invest in a project like this?
The Department's mandate is to provide for the accessibility and dissemination of scientific knowledge that was created as the result of government sponsored R&D. The resources that are actually invested are very small as the citations provided by the journal publishers are freely provided at no charge. Many professional societies who wish to engage their publications in electronic commerce see this as the trend for the future. PubSCIENCE will not only facilitate access to scientific knowledge developed through government sponsored research, but will also expand use and access to broader peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What is the future of PubSCIENCE?
OSTI will continue to expand the collaboration through negotiations with other journal publishers and provide the DOE research community and the public with access. PubSCIENCE represents a unique partnership between the Federal government and the public/private journal publishers focused on facilitating good science by providing access to peer reviewed scientific and technical literature. This represents a major milestone in the goal of "Bringing Science to the Desktop" through the application of Web-based information technology.
[go here for the complete text: http://web.archive.org/web/20011007040328/pubsci.
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.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remember, Microsoft forced the NSA to stop development of SELinux for that very reason.
photosMy Photostream
These sound like exactly the same people that want to deny opensource licenses to software created with taxpayer dollars. How long before they go after opensource in general?
Linux is keeping Microsoft from making that last 5% of the profit they could be squeezing out and is therefore Communist, anti-Capitalist, anti-American, and evil. Lets outlaw sites like Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Heck lets shutdown Ibiblio and get rid of public literature, research, and software all in one punch.
Welcome to America. Corporate greed and political corruption next 3000 miles. Please have a credit reference ready before departing the train.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Well, yes, the testing requirements are rather draconian. But then again, does anyone remember thalidomide? It was rushed through approval in Europe, but the only victims in the US were those involved in the initial safety trials. (This was mostly due to the efforts of the FDA chief at the time.)
There's a reason that drug approval is so expensive here. It's not something you'd want to cut corners on.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Umm...actually, it makes sense as is. It would make better sense in another form, agreed, but...
Publishers' Attack Free-Government Sites
As in, publishers own sites which attack this thing called "Free Government". Which just about sounds like what's happening.
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
I bet I know a lot more about politics than you do.
I bet I'm a lot more willing to learn what I don't know.
I also bet I'm more willing to explore what works rather than dwell on unlikely potentials (Passing a law to hang corrupt bureaucrats)
I admire your convictions, and I think people should be reminded that we have the power to pass laws to hang corrupt bureaucrats, but I'm not going make all my hopes contingent on the unlikely possibility.
Not everybody has been voting since 1976, but I also noticed you didn't flaunt your experience working/volunteering for elected officials, organzing opposition against laws, bills, policy, etc.
Secondly, I wasn't targeting you, I was trying to advise anyone who read my post to learn as much as they can about how the system REALLY works as a way to channel thier rage against these assholes.
It reminds me of that Onion, Point-Pounterpoint, "We must retaliate with blind rage." vs. "We must retaliate with measured, focused rage."
Point-CounterPoint
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
No, no. Frob is right. Embarassed for not saying so myself, but I was steamed.
These people are generally on our side. Look at the other things they have done. In fact, we are their constituency, and they are part of our community. They should understand, and listen.
Milo
Everyone seems to be terribly insensed, that the goventment will no longer be providing these documents for "free" to everyone.
News flash. The government doesn't really provide ANYTHING for free. We all pay for everything the government does, with taxes. And when the government does things, typically it does it in a horrifically inefficient manner.
My basic rule of thumb, is that the government should exist to do ONLY those functions that cannot be done in a reasonable manner at all by private companies. The primary purpose of government, should be to protect citizens from others. Virtually any other function is either unnecessary completely (saving citizens from themselves aka war on drugs etc) or better done by the private sector.
Police, Military, SEC (maybe), Judicial System, are all valid functions of government. The bulk of what the government does, to me falls under the "it shouldn't" category.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
However, my impression was that a bunch of publishers were going after government websites that were free. Hm.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
I'll take NYC regulations against anarchic non regulated commerce. It's not that I advocate monopolistic activietes, but without smart and enforced commerce regulations and city ordinances, things can become anarchic quite easily.
Sorry, but for a minute there, I thought you said smart. Oh...you did.
Actually they're doing two different jobs. Private security firms are there to protect you, public police forces are there to enforce the law and catch law breakers. The public police force (at least in the US) does not have an obligation to protect you. People, in the face of complete indifference on the part of their local public police, try to sue on negligence grounds every once in awhile. They get shot down every time.
They do indirectly compete but not as much as you might think.
The American government has determined in all of its infinitesimal wisdom (what can you expect from a government led by a shrubbery ("Ni!")?) that large corporations are better than small ones and that almost any corporation is better than any individual (unless the individual has a whole s--tload of money).
Not entirely a new thing though - check out Tom Paxton's song "I'm changing my name to Chrysler" from which I quote the follwoing lines :
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
and should someone go broke, become unemployed, have to live on social security or whatever as a result of this idiocy, they can always take this hint (also from Mr. Paxton):
You can eat dog food! You really ought to try it!
You can fricassee it! You can deep fry it!
Flip it on over, eat it any way.
Eat along with Rover - three times a day!
For those for whom the name Tom Paxton is not entirely familiar, his music is likely to be (at least in once case) something sitting dormant in your memory, waiting to ambush you - here's the chorus from what is probably his most familiar song :
It went "Zip" when it moved,
And "Pop" when it stopped,
And, "Whirrr" when it stood still.
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will.
Well, it is wandering along toward the toy season, innit?
1. Authors/employers retain all proprietary rights in any process, procedure, or article of manufacture described in the Work.
4. In the case of a Work performed under a U.S. Government contract or grant, the IEEE recognizes that the U.S. Government has royalty-free permission to reproduce all or portions of the Work, and to authorize others to do so, for official U.S. Government purposes only, if the contract/grant so requires.
6. Although authors are permitted to re-use all or portions of the Work in other works, this does not include granting third-party requests for reprinting, republishing, or other types of re-use. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office must handle all such third-party requests.
How can these terms be used to keep you from publishing your work, as distinct from the formated work, in other papers? It looks like you still own your work, and may quote it verbatim. Am I missing something there? Why do they encourage folks to publish themselves on the web? I know that other journals and groups do try to keep you from publishing elsewhere. Do they all use the same language as seen in the IEEE form?
In the end, I have to admit that copyright transfer is a strange way of granting someone permision to publish your article and the potential for abuse is large.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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
I lived in Puebla for four months myself.
It has become a nightmare for neighbors
OK, having livedin California for most of my life, and having lived in Puebla for four months, I prefer the approach of having a lot of small street venders over having everything sold in big stores.
Having everything be in a few mega-shops makes the streets in America very impersonal and dehumanizing. The way there are those small street venders everywhere gives Puebla a human touch which California cities do not have.
The only time the street vendors have bothered me was when I was in tourist areas (such as Acapulco); they would come up to me and try to sell me things when I wanted to be left alone. This was never a problem when I was in Puebla.
In terms of them blocking traffic, I have never seen that myself. Then again, the nice thing about México is that you guys actually have an effective public transportation system; I found that I didn't have any need for a car when I lived in Puebla since I usually only had to wait a total of one or two minutes for a combi going where I wanted to be to show up.
The popularity of Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Gigante, Bodega (a supermarket chain owned by Wal-Wart), and other big chain stores in México demonstrates that small street stands are not as much a threat to big chain retailers as New York retailers say they are.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.