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Who Owns Science?

Posted by timothy on from the wants-to-be-free dept.

immerrath writes "The New York Times has an article [Sorry, tomorrow's article, no Google link yet] on a movement that is rapidly gaining support in the scientific community: the Public Library of Science(PLoS). The founders, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, Stanford biologist Pat Brown and Berkeley Lab scientist Michael Eisen, argue that scientific literature cannot be privately controlled or owned by the publishers of scientific journals, and must instead be available in public archives freely accessible by anyone and everyone. This has very important implications for the fundamental principle that Science must transcend all economic, national and other barriers. For a while now, PLoS has been trying to get scientific journals to release the rights to scientific papers; many major journals have not complied -- in response, PLoS is starting PLoS-standard-compliant journals (for which they received a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation), to demonstrate the validity of the idea and persuade academic publishers to adopt the free access model. They even have a GPL-like open access Licence, and their journals have some very prominent scientists on the editorial board. Here is the text of an earlier Newsweek article about PLoS, and here is a Nature Public Debate explaining the issues. Michael Eisen received the 2002 Benjamin Franklin award for his work on PLoS. Don't forget to sign the PLoS open letter!"

7 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. FIRST!!!!!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Woohoo!!!! Suck it!

  2. woo hoo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    woo hoo!

  3. FP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Uh...the first post engine suxors! Humph.

  4. Redmond by IlluminatedOne · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Doesn't Microsoft own science?

  5. MINE! MINE! MINE! PAY ME! by flyneye · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    its been mine all along.i inherited it from a dead uncle who'd been holding the title and deed to it all these years.hang on a second ill set up a paypal account.
    form a line to the left.
    major credit cards accepted.
    wait'll Beakman sees the suit im gonna file,he'll have to pimp his rat!

    --
    *Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
  6. What the hell kind of commies are these? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    PUBLIC ownership? That's a paddling!

  7. wtf clever troll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I'm on to you. What the fuck does PMFJI and TLTBT mean? Anything like YHBT YHL HAND.