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Open Source Science

Posted by timothy on from the pay-piper-call-tune dept.

Tim writes "A few days ago (June 26th), the "Public Access to Science" act was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act would ammend the US Copyright Act to "exclude from copyright protection works resulting from scientific research substantially funded by the Federal Government," in essence, requiring all federally-funded scientific research to be published as open content. The Public Library of Science has a press release with more information."

2 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. This means it can't be GPL'd by spitzak · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This does mean that such work cannot be released under the GPL either (since the GPL requires copyright), it must be public domain.

    I don't think this is a bad thing, actually. But I'm sure the lobbyists are going to twist this into "the government can't *buy* GPL code".

  2. Re:Wonderful news! What's next? by zenyu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But I'm not sure I agree there are "excessive profits" at journals, especially since some of them have recently spent big $$ to digitize and archive old articles--in many cases dating back over a hundred years.

    I'm sure my librarians would disagree with you $10,000 or more for a 12 issues of a journal is only possible because libraries buy these things for demanding faculty. There is a huge difference in price between the $50-$100 for a IEEE/ACM journal and one of the commercial journals. I draw the line at reviewing for a journal at $500/yr. The last publisher of $20-30 math books, Springer-Verlag, just got sold to a publisher that wants to maximize profit with no regard for the academic process they are serving. I think it may be time to abandon these old school publishers, I'm sure you could collect enough pre-orders with an electronic edition to get Dover or Eldritch Press to make a print run and mail them out. No one writes these books that sell 200-1000 copies worldwide for profit, it's merely a nicer form than pdf files.