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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."
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.
Can someone explain this to a non-American? Tax-payers money creates/collects information. Then a private company, accountable to no-one,except perhaps shareholders if its a public company, says "No, sorry, you can't give that away because we're selling similar info"? Is that it? Seems wrong to me.
I guess someone will now call me a Eurotrash commie or something equally enlightened, but how does this move improve literacy/understanding/progress in any way? Is the US government really that transparently corrupt?
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
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!
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.
Is a list of SIIA members. Its important that we know who we are dealing with.
- 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
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.
Is the US government really that transparently corrupt?
Unfortunately, yes. It is. This kind of thing actually happens all the time. It is similar to the way that patents are awarded that were developed with public funds (IMO)
This is an ex-parrot!
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.
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.
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?
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 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."
I understand that you don't want to pay for something twice. I understand that corporations have to make money. But, if information is to be locked up and only given out to those who can afford it then progress will surely be limited to how much money you can afford to spend doing research. Such an arrangement would mean that only those with capitol to spare would have any chance at the American Dream(tm) or any other for that matter.
.
P r o g r e s s w i l l s l o w d o w n
It is the free and open exchange of ideas and data that has spurred the rapid growth in understanding and technology. Lock it up and we go back to the dark ages (a truly Replublican ideal kind of arrangement).
Corelation is the key! Not islands of information distinct and separate. A mass of intelligent people working on the same problems (with free and open access to common data) will make more progress than a few rich researchers (with access to limited proprietary data). Genome Project anyone?
What about the poor kid who has no money to pay for fee-based information services but has an abundance of intelligence? Is he to be held back? Know what a library is? Should we now shut their doors? Should we go to privatization of schools and only teach the people who start life with money? Wait! I know what your answer probably will be.
Ben Franklin would not approve - and he was a civic minded type of guy.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
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.
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.
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...