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Who Owns Science?
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!"
Information wants to free YOU!
I don't know what the mystery is. No one is preventing anyone from buying a copy. And if you can't buy one, then you really don't need it anyway.
Printing and serving electronic versions costs money. These people obviously must be DemocRATS, who think that money just grows on trees for everyone.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA.. ..my fist smashes your fucking face open like it was a fucking pinata..and instead of treats it's your goddamn brains spilling out like grotesque bloody candy..
yeah.
You could be arrested for being free!
SCIENCE 0wNZ YOU!