Scientist Must Pay to Read His Own Paper

Glyn Moody writes "Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, was lost for words when he found Oxford University Press's website demanded $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons license. As he writes, the journal in question was "selling my intellectual property, without my permission, against the terms of the license (no commercial use)." In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?"

Comments

UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[UbuntuDupe]

1) Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand. It just means that the author has permitted people to copy it without his explicit approval. He should still be able to get it from someone else who doesn't want to charge him. Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it, he has a case against OUP (for violating the license), but he's not being "denied access to his own paper"; it's just that one of many authorized providers simply isn't providing it. (Am I being "denied access to Jane Austen" when website #2938093583 won't email her works to me for free?)

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

3) Yes, it would be nice if no publicly funded worker could ever hold any exclusive IP in their intellectual works. However, this would mean less intellectual work production by them. It's a tradeoff like any other.

Oh, and

4) Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC?

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[eln]

Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it, he has a case against OUP (for violating the license), but he's not being "denied access to his own paper"

The summary states that his license stipulates no commercial use. Charging anything for the paper beyond your own costs for providing it (a nominal bandwidth and storage fee, perhaps) is commercial use. On the face of it, OUP is violating the license.

If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access

That's a great theory, but then you get every scientist posting his research to his blog. In scientific circles, the idea of "peer-reviewed" research is very important. If you are not publishing in a well known and widely-read journal, you are not likely to get a whole lot of your peers to even read the research much less try to duplicate your results. Without duplication, scientific results are damn near useless.

Yes, it would be nice if no publicly funded worker could ever hold any exclusive IP in their intellectual works. However, this would mean less intellectual work production by them. It's a tradeoff like any other.

Most academic types do the research for its own sake, not necessarily to make money directly from it. These people tend to make money by writing books about their research, conducting lectures on it, and using it on their resumes to get nice tenured positions. It's usually the universities that make all the money selling it to private industry.

Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC?

I would be surprised if they even read the license at all.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Virgil Tibbs]

if you read tfa you will see he is NOT complaining about access to it to read but them selling its redistribution rights despite the licence explicitly pointing out it is NON-commercial redistribution which is allowed....
his issue isn't getting people to publish his article...
his issue is someone selling his work, although the licence does not permit that.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[kebes]

Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand.

True. Except in this case, the author is paying an open-access surcharge. In the blog post he says: "After all, the author has paid for this". The purpose of the surcharge is to help the journal cover distribution costs, thereby guaranteeing that everyone can read the article. If the journal accepts that publication fee, but then charges readers anyway, isn't that fraud?

Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it

He did use such a condition. He used a creative commons license with a non-commercial clause, so it's illegal for the publisher to charge people for distribution. Again from his post, he says: "The journal is therefore SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WITHOUT MY PERMISSION AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)"

If publishers are really contributing nothing ... stop publishing through them!

The controversy here is precisely that he decided to publish in an open access journal. In fact, you can read about their open access policy here, which says: "From 1st January 2005, all articles published in NAR are freely available online immediately upon publication. This means that it is no longer necessary to hold a subscription in order to read current NAR content online."

After paying his >$2000 publication charge, the journal turned around and tried to charge others for access. As he points out, this could have been an innocent mistake on their part. But, it's a violation of the agreement he had with them, and needs to be fixed.

Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

I don't know if the word "bigoted" is warranted, but I agree that we scientists need to push for open access. Which is what he did, by publishing in an open-access journal.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[smallfries]

The author doesn't mention the copyright-transfer form (if any) that he signed. If he refused to sign the copyright transfer form then it is hard to understand how the journal could publish it in the first place. But if he did then he has a fair point as they don't have the right to sell the published form of the paper.

It's nice to hear somebody raising this as a problem because the current system of copyright transfers is a bitch. However, he wants to distribute the paper to his own students - why does he need the printed from the journal? He wrote the original paper, and presumably has the original source for the paper, so why not just print that off instead. He sounds like somebody doing this to try and make a noise, rather than because it is actually hindering him.

Your fourth point is quite interesting, as if they are systematically charging for CC material then they seem to have screwed up.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[UbuntuDupe]

The summary states that his license stipulates no commercial use. Charging anything for the paper beyond your own costs for providing it (a nominal bandwidth and storage fee, perhaps) is commercial use. On the face of it, OUP is violating the license. Yes, I was just objecting to the summary's characterization that he's being "denied access to his paper", though I guess I should be numb to /. sensationalism by now.

That's a great theory, but then you get every scientist posting his research to his blog. Strawman. My altnerative was not "put your papers on your blog". It was "have a peer-reviewed journal that cuts out the middleman".

If you are not publishing in a well known and widely-read journal, you are not likely to get a whole lot of your peers to even read the research much less try to duplicate your results. Sure, and that's a fault of scientists, not publishers. If you refuse to read something because it was "merely" peer-reviewed by a committee of respectable scientists that didn't have Kluwer's blessing, you are the problem, not Kluwer.

Most academic types do the research for its own sake, not necessarily to make money directly from it. Then why don't scientists all work for free? The more that *can* be made, the more people you'll draw, and the more output you'll generate, because you pull in the marginal cases. Just the law of supply at work.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

"The summary states that his license stipulates no commercial use. Charging anything for the paper beyond your own costs for providing it (a nominal bandwidth and storage fee, perhaps) is commercial use."

I could make a nice analogy and a nasty analogy, but as it's late in the day and I need to go to the loo I shall make a nasty one:

even if a large organisation is "not for profit", then out of moneys donated to a specific cause, they can (or at least they do, and noone complains) still legitimately withhold administrative, audit, tax and permanent employee costs, rather than solely deducting the fee the bank charges to wire the proceeds.

In this specific case you would need to consider the costs of not only providing it, but of all the administrative structures that support the provision (including e.g. the costs to paralegals who consider the implications of licensing agreements), and the fact that your customer base is rather small.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[kebes]

it's a violation of the agreement he had with them, and needs to be fixed.

Sorry to reply to my own comment... but...

The article he couldn't access was this one: "MACiE (Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes): novel tools for searching catalytic mechanisms" (doi 10.1093/nar/gkl774). I just tried accessing it from a non-subscription IP address, and I was able to load the PDF without issue. All the articles on the page seemed to load without asking for payment.

So, in short, this was probably an innocent mistake and seems to be already fixed.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Xiaran]

That's a great theory, but then you get every scientist posting his research to his blog. In scientific circles, the idea of "peer-reviewed" research is very important

Then why can not say a groups of universities get together and develop their own international web journal of all sciences(TM). Im thikning something like slashdot(only much more rigorous on access and content submission). You could have "moderators" who would be like experts in the field the paper is written for. Interested observers who have expertise in a related field etc. You could even have a system where people could be sponsored by other to be experts(Im thinking amateur astronomers who make many contributions to astronomy but may not have a related degree).

Wasnt this kinda thing the reason for the invention of HTML in the first place?

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Lumpy]

If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

It's not scientists, it's the Academic types. upper Academics are full of bigots and always has been. Real geniuses always get panned by them until their research generates a huge uproar ouside their little silly boys club. Einstein, had to deal with the Bigots as well as many MANY other geniuses of our time.

It has always been that way, and is why more and more of the newer science students are going against it and breaking ranks. honestly it should have happened decades ago but they have quite a bit of power over you as a researcher if they do not allow your work to be published in their holy tomes.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[eln]

Not a bad idea, but I suspect when you get a bunch of big institutions involved, they're eventually going to try and make money off it, and then you end up with another big journal that charges people for access just like you have now.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[jpfed]

Peer review and outrageously overpriced journals do not have to go hand in hand. Reviewers do their work for free, so it's not out of the question to have a peer-reviewed journal that happened to be distributed for free to anyone that wanted it.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't banging out these journals on Remington typewriters. The system you're proposing is how journals operate now, all the way down to the layman advisors.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[mbrod]

I think Slashdot should actually do it.

"scholar.slashdot.org"

You could do a number of interesting things to entice the scholarly community to use the service.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[kebes]

I need to correct myself (again). The article PDF is available for free download, but if you go to the article page and click on the "Request permission" link, you're brought to a new page where you can request permission to, for instance, print out copies for use in class. The form then tells you how much you have to pay them for those permissions.

The issue, of course, is that this explicitly violates the creative commons (noncommercial) license that he published under (and which the journal evidently agreed to, in order to be able to post his paper at all). The journal is thus illegally charging others for permissions that are free.

It still looks like a honest mistake. The structure of the website is such that a standard "permissions system" is being applied to a wide range of content for various journals. They seem to be mistakenly applying this system even to the open-access journals in the collection.

Even though this is probably just an honest mistake, it needs to be fixed ASAP. They are presently breaking the law and very much going against the spirit of the agreement that he entered into with them when he published his paper.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[wahgnube]

Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access.

Or, you can use an existing, free, Cornell/NSF-supported e-print repository, arXiv.org.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

As the article says, try "request permissions".

You could still think obviously an oversight, but then at the bottom of that page it notes that open-access articles are already covered by Creative Commons and thus only available for non-commercial use. So... they obviously know a creative commons license may apply, forbidding commercial use, and then provide a commercial use of it themselves..?

Yeah. All makes perfect sense.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Chris_Keene]

Where to start, first try http://pisdcoalition.org/
as the 'alternative' site to prism (they forgot that wanting to share you knowledge is the work of communists).

Background:
Researchers at Universities do research.
They are paid by the University, and they (well the University) may have received a grant to carry out the research (from nsf in the US or the research councils in the UK for example).

Once they have done their research they write it up, normally in a paper (in the arts it can be a dance!).

They send the paper to our journal. The journal's editorial board receive it and will the have it peer reviewed by other researchers in the same field to ensure it meets a level of quality and is suitable for the journal. This is the crucial part of the process. But the peer reviews do not get paid for this, and the VAST majority of editors do not get paid either.

The publishers then sell the journal to the very Universities who supplied the articles for free and allowed their academics to peer review and edit for free (on university time normally).

The publisher will normally demand they own the copyright.

The price they sell journals to Universities have gone up far more than inflation year after year after year, which means unis cancel journal subs. Plus the contracts are complex with huge tie-ins and 'if you buy x you must by z' clauses.

All publishers to is take the work of the academic (for free), get the editors and peers to review (for free) and then demand they own it, all for basically doing little more than formatting the document, proof reading and putting on a website (and, rarer now-a-days, in print). These are basic clerical jobs, not something which means they should own the copyright.

As noted, Universities and academics often do not have access to their own work.

There are changes afoot.

The Open Access movement is taking off (either through freely available journals, or by making the articles available on University websites). The latter are referred to as Institutional Repositories (unsexy name!) and I happen to run one. The software they use is either http://www.dspace.org/ or http://www.eprints.org/ both are free and open source.

Chris

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[The_Wilschon]

I know, don't feed the trolls... I'm doing it anyway.

Why don't all scientists work for free? Talk about a strawman. We have families to feed, man! Rent to pay! Sure, I would do research even if I weren't being paid for it. But, I have to do something for money, or else I and my family starve living on the streets. So, I suppose I could bus tables for pay, and do research for free. But that would be pretty stupid, seeing as how people are willing to pay for research.

Furthermore, if you "cut out the middleman", then you cut out deadtree versions of the journal (important) and you cut out monetary compensation for those doing the reviewing (see above, important). "Cut out the middleman" is a nice catchy phrase that strikes a chord in the hearts of many. But unless someone can come up with a real way in which it can be made to work, it is nothing more than demagogy.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[mpe]

Again from his post, he says: "The journal is therefore SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WITHOUT MY PERMISSION AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)"

Distributing someone else's copyrighted work without their permission is simply against the law. The copyright holder can take legal actions to both stop the "pirate" doing this and recover damages from them. If they are doing so as a commercial enterprise the damages which can be claimed tend to be greater...

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[sdedeo]

(1) Jane Austen's works are in public domain. You can do anything you like with them (including release them with the author's name changed to your own!) This man holds copyright to his own work and can severely restrict its distribution.

(2) Some journals have more "juice" than others, and the oldest ones have the most (usually.) I was told by a colleague in my field that, for example, Physical Review D (lots of pay-per-view / access restrictions) is a better place to publish than JCAP. I am small-fry, so I go where I'm told. (Although JCAP is now advertising a very high impact factor, not sure if things are already changing.)

(3) Not sure what this means. My scientific production is unconnected to my holding IP rights over it, but then, I'm a cosmologist. Many universities take control over your IP if it makes them money, or at least demand some profit sharing.

(4) Not sure, but as far as I can tell from posts below, they allow you to use CC licensing if you pay an additional fee?

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Not Invented Here]

Then why can not say a groups of universities get together and develop their own international web journal of all sciences(TM). They've already started.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[UbuntuDupe]

I know, don't dignify the clueless ... but I'm doing it anyway.

We have families to feed, man! Rent to pay! Sure, I would do research even if I weren't being paid for it. But, I have to do something for money, or else I and my family starve living on the streets. So, I suppose I could bus tables for pay, and do research for free. But that would be pretty stupid, seeing as how people are willing to pay for research.

Then you agree that monetary compensation positively affects the production of scientific discoveries, which was my only point there.

Furthermore, if you "cut out the middleman", then you cut out deadtree versions of the journal (important) and

No you don't. You can still hire any number of bargain custom printing companies to make the paper copies of the journal issues, and then charge people who want that sent to them, the cost of production. You're confusing publishing and printing.

cut out monetary compensation for those doing the reviewing (see above, important).

But I thought monetary compensation didn't affect the supply of scientific works! Oh, right...

In any case, reviewers aren't paid today either, generally.

"Cut out the middleman" is a nice catchy phrase that strikes a chord in the hearts of many. But unless someone can come up with a real way in which it can be made to work, it is nothing more than demagogy.

Er, that's my point: you *can't* cut out the middleman, but the reason for that is scientists' irrational preference for having an unnecessary, exploitative publisher put its name on their work. Get rid of the bigotry, and remove the obstacles to genuine science.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[UbuntuDupe]

Could you remind me which part of my post (or which belief you think I have) any of that contradicts?

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[drfireman]

If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end. In many (probably most or all) fields, the most prestigious journals are commercial journals. Do you really want to be the first scientist on your block to stop publishing in reputable journals because you don't like their terms? It's a huge oversimplification to say the problem is on the scientists' end. These journals became prestigious back when there were no open alternatives. Now they're entrenched. It's difficult to get an entire community to change overnight. And if it doesn't change overnight, then someone has to be first to take that risk with an article they'd really like to disseminate to the community. Best case, you get a bunch of big shots to start as bunch of open journals. In fields with a lot of journals to choose from, it would take many many such efforts to make a dent.

I don't have an investment in pointing fingers, but you're giving out bad advice. In many fields, telling someone to "stop publishing through them" is equivalent to saying, "go into a different field." I have a hard time seeing the fact that few scientists take this advice as a problem with scientists. It's actually a difficult problem to solve, and one that requires a concerted effort from people who are largely ambivalent.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[king-manic]

No you don't. You can still hire any number of bargain custom printing companies to make the paper copies of the journal issues, and then charge people who want that sent to them, the cost of production. You're confusing publishing and printing.

The main purpose of journals is to have a group of scientists review the work before publication. A discount press is unlikely to have a mailing list of qualified scientists to send it to.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Leperous]

"If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end." Ah I see, so the fact that these journals are refereed means nothing to you. Scientists should just spend their time wading through arXiv all day for the good stuff. /golfclap

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[UbuntuDupe]

You're also confusing publishing and printing. There are two functions the publisher performs:

1) Vet the work to make sure it's appropriate quality.
2) Print it out.

There are completely separate functions. In my (extremely obvious) suggestion, scientists still vet the submission. Anything work involving printing lots of copies, once you know what the article should be, can be outsourced to a discount press.

(Seriously, this is basic stuff. I wonder how a lot of you put your shoes on in the morning. But at least I know how patent examiners get rooked into thinking some inventions are non-obvious when they're not.)

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

"Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end."

This mountain is in the way. It is clearly the problem of the mountain, since it is clearly in a place that people would want to get through. When will it learn?

The problem here is that there is a great deal more to the issue than this nice idea allows for. The cold, hard, truth of the matter is that publishers DO contribute something to the mix: reputation.

With reference also to the later suggestion ("why not start your own university like Laplace did?") I could start a journal myself, or a university. Why would it (almost certainly) fail? Reputation. Scientists are humans like anyone else. Despite what you may have heard about the Scientific Method we do not have time to read *every* article published in what might notionally be our field. It is therefore common to have a few journals which one keeps an eye on.

New journals come and go all the time. Most fail. Why? No-one reads them. Therefore no-one cites them and no-one publishes in them. High-profile names can add something but how many of them have the time? They're too busy being high-profile to bother with such messy business.

Compare my new Journal of Whatever with Nature. By any reasonable metric Nature is a very very good journal to get a paper into. Especially when at an early stage in one's career it is possible to make a very big leap to the next stage with only a single such article. However you dress it up the reasons for publishing in Nature are the same as the reasons for going to Oxbridge, or Harvard: it will impress people. It is much easier to persuade someone to give you money to research your latest diseased idea, work for them or whatever if you have impressed them in some way.

This is getting too waffly but the point I'm making is basically this:

- The purpose of research is to influence the way people think and act
- The only way to ensure a successful research career is to have a lot of influence
- The only way to have a lot of influence is to make your research as public as possible
- The best way to publicise your research is to put it somewhere that people are likely to look

It is *necessary* for there to be places which most people look in order for science to work on an international scale. If the process of publicising research is too diffuse we won't reach critical mass of ideas.

I might also add that on a practical level the power-structure of publishing is very important: reviewers are quite simply more critical when they review papers for better journals. And generally speaking it is more of an honour to be asked to review for a better journal, so better journals are likely to be better reviewed.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[king-manic]

That's a great theory, but then you get every scientist posting his research to his blog. In scientific circles, the idea of "peer-reviewed" research is very important

Then why can not say a groups of universities get together and develop their own international web journal of all sciences(TM). Im thikning something like slashdot(only much more rigorous on access and content submission). You could have "moderators" who would be like experts in the field the paper is written for. Interested observers who have expertise in a related field etc. You could even have a system where people could be sponsored by other to be experts(Im thinking amateur astronomers who make many contributions to astronomy but may not have a related degree).

Wasnt this kinda thing the reason for the invention of HTML in the first place?

Thats basically what a journal is. A association of scientists who get together to publish work they figure meets their criteria. of course sifting through a thousand entries to publish the valid ones requires time and no one wants to do work for free. Thus Journals charge to subscribe to them because someone has to pay the people to review the articles.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[king-manic]

You're also confusing publishing and printing. There are two functions the publisher performs:

1) Vet the work to make sure it's appropriate quality.
2) Print it out.

There are completely separate functions. In my (extremely obvious) suggestion, scientists still vet the submission. Anything work involving printing lots of copies, once you know what the article should be, can be outsourced to a discount press.

(Seriously, this is basic stuff. I wonder how a lot of you put your shoes on in the morning. But at least I know how patent examiners get rooked into thinking some inventions are non-obvious when they're not.)

The printing is a trivial part of the costs. The most expensive part is the editing, reviewing. Your suggestions does little to alleviate anything. I work for a non profit publisher that does not print in house. If a journal does this too they may save a bit but the bulk of the cost is in content management/review/editing/filtering. The printing itself may be far more expensive if not done in volumes which some journals do them. Also a scientist would be clueless about types of paper, layout, proofs etc.. so the scientists would have to hire people who do that. That is what most journals do, they do the print related stuff that scientists need nto bother with.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read my posts before responding. It's fun. It's like reading, but ... of my posts.

Please read the fucking summary before responding. It's fun. It's like reading, but... the fucking summary.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[adrianmonk]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access.

This is a nice idea, but a researcher is unlikely to make this choice even if they want to promote open access. The reason is, a big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level of prestige of the journals that they can get their papers published in. A researcher's output is research, and the tangible and visible sign of that is publications, so it is the only reflection of their work that many people see. Prestige is so important that there is a formal system to denote the prestige of a journal: they are each assigned an Impact Factor. So, 99% of the time, a researcher will submit their paper to the most prestigious journal they think will accept it, and any other concern is secondary.

There do exist open-access journals, but at present these tend to be towards the lower end of the prestige scale. Basically, journals that have a high impact factor do not have any need to offer open access and can easily get away with charging for access. Journals with a lower impact factor are interested in providing open access as a way to create interest in their journal. So although some journals have a motivation to provide open access, most researchers are motivated to publish in journals with high prestige, and as a consequence, they tend to prefer journals which as a side effect happen to not be open access.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Paracelcus]

Yeah, sure but if you could demand that the money being extorted via the university's library fees could go to helping disadvantaged students with tuition and materials would you still be pissed at the $48.00 charge?

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[DerekLyons]

Most academic types do the research for its own sake, not necessarily to make money directly from it.

That's a nice theory - but it really doesn't hold water. As you yourself say;
 

These people tend to make money by writing books about their research, conducting lectures on it, and using it on their resumes to get nice tenured positions.

If they are using the research to get money - they are doing the research to get money. Period. Any other claim is just doublespeak to comfort their minds and make them feel all 'moral' and 'academic' and above the money grubbing workaday crowd. My brother-in-law (A full Dr and Professor of Economics) puts it thus: "You are damm straight it's about the money - I have two daughters who may want to go to college someday, a new baby, a house payment, a car payment, and have the rather bad habit of eating on a regular basis". (His daughters, if they go to his college will get reduced tuition - but it isn't free, ditto for the house. It's price controlled by the University, and *substantially* cheaper than living out in town, but it's not free.)

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Chris_Keene]

none, it was a good post.

But i had to catch a train home (UK, currently 7pm here) wanted to air my anger at the silly situation and yours was the first post at the top that i hit reply to. Pure laziness on my part, pure and simple :) (sorry!)

(isn't replying to the top high scoring post in order that your own gets read and mod'ed a rule of slashdot?!)

Chris

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[LLKrisJ]

I think it is just a bit silly of the guy to try and release under CC. Its a totally useless endeavor seeing that each and every journal makes you sign one of those copyright transfer documents before publishing. This effectively transfers copyright of the publication over to them. I know because I also published multiple reasearch publications, its standard procedure... What was he thinking? :)

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Convector]

Reviewers don't get paid. In addition to the journal charging a subscription fee, generally the author is also required to pay publication fees. Typically that's paid for by the grant that supported the research, but it still bites the big one. I'm not altogether sure what all the money gets spent on, but I've never recieved a cent as either author or reviewer. Except indirectly, as publication enables employment.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[eli pabst]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

Scientists are starting to do exactly that. There are now several peer-reviewed online journals that are open access. In particular PLoS is one which is publishing a significant amount of high-quality research. The are still two problems though, 1) there still aren't enough journals like this, in part because it costs money to have a full-time editor and do typesetting and 2) because your career is largely dependent on the number/quality of publications, it's still worth it to pay (especially when it's coming out of grant money anyway). This latter part is really what has put pressure on journals to provide open access. If it's tax payer dollars that are footing the bill then the tax payer should be able to see the results free of charge.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[turtledawn]

Right... so that's why nearly every journal specifies its preferred printing layout down to the number of characters in the columns (on top of how many columns) and the maximum size of the diagrams, and if you don't meet those standards precisely you don't get published- you don't even get a note saying why your work was rejected.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read my posts before responding. It's fun. It's like reading, but ... of my posts. Everytime I see you post, I read your username as "ubuntudope."
Everytime I read your posts, I think that would be a much more apropos username.

1) Just because it's released under CC doesn't mean that people must give you a copy for free on demand... If you had read the article you'd know that in this case the journal WAS obligated to give you and anyone else a copy for free because (a) the CC variant was non-commercial and (b) the author PAID for the distribution costs himself specifically so that the journal would be so obligated.

2) here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! You are familiar with the oligoply of the RIAA members on music distribution? The academic journals have a very similar oligoply. Your 'solution' doesn't do the individual researcher any good at all.

it would be nice if no publicly funded worker could ever hold any exclusive IP in their intellectual works. However, this would mean less intellectual work production by them. This is a completely unsupported claim on your part. You presume the status quo is the optimal solution, when that is hardly ever the case in the real world.

4) Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC? What a dope. How do you presume to title your post "untangling squad" when you haven't even read the article and are posting questions that are answered in it? Just what do you think you are 'untangling?'

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[mazarin5]

Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

Some of our most brilliant scientists have been doing this for years already.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[samweber]

I would be surprised if they even read the license at all *sigh* Clearly, you didn't read the license yourself.

The summary states that his license stipulates no commercial use. Charging anything for the paper beyond your own costs for providing it (a nominal bandwidth and storage fee, perhaps) is commercial use. On the face of it, OUP is violating the license. If you read the license on his article, which is explicitly stated at the top of the journal's web page, you'll see that the license does not prevent commercial use. Instead, it reads "Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder". In other words, you can use it for commercial purposes, if you get permission.

Note, the site DOES give free access to the article for non-commercial use, and clearly states this at the top of the page.

The thing the author is complaining about is the link TO REQUEST PERMISSION FOR COMMERCIAL USE. When you get the quote, it even explictly says that you do not need to do this for non-commercial use. The author, for some reason, clipped this text out of his screenshot.

Furthermore, the journal in its instructions for authors seems quite clear on its policy for granting permission for commercial use, and requires a license from the authors to do this.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[amber_of_luxor]

> Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand. It just means that the author has permitted people to copy it

I guess you didn't notice that the article in question has a CC-By-NC 2.0 license

Which means that non-gratis distribution is a violation of the license.

Furthermore, as a for profit corporation, distribution or use of material with a CC-By-NC 2.0 license is an automatic violation, regardless of fees for accessing the data.

OUP has three choices:
* Negotiate for the right to (commercially) distribute CC-NC material;
* Decline all CC-NC material;
* Budget several million dollars per year for copyright violations;

If the Board of Director's at OUP has any brains, they will select the first option. Negotiate for the rights for distribution.

Amber

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Your Pal Dave]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals With Blackjack... And Hookers!

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Ascoo]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end. It's a bit unfair to say that aren't contributing anything. There's a fair amount of work that needs to be done in order to A) assign appropriate reviewers for the submitted articles B) handle correspondence between the reviewers and author, C) typeset and proofread the article, D) actually publish the article in non-electronic format. The fees they charge not only go to offset the cost of publication and help pay salaries, but IMHO are there to prevent a flooding of craptastic articles. If you know you have to pay $500-$1000 per article, I'm sure you're going to make sure it's as polished as possible before submission. This helps to reduce the actual time-to-publish and improves the quality of the journal. Most scientists I know don't publish 10s of articles every year, so having to dish out $$$ a few times a year usually won't break their budgets.

As for not publishing in those journals, it's just not realistic right now.. While open access journals are becoming more popular (personally i like the Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/, they are still not as well read as some of the high profile (as well as usually restrictive and expensive) journals. The bottom line for most scientists is to get their science out and read. Setting up your own journal is a great idea, if you don't mind waiting years to gain the respect and "number of eye-balls" of some of the more prominent journals.

3) Yes, it would be nice if no publicly funded worker could ever hold any exclusive IP in their intellectual works. However, this would mean less intellectual work production by them. It's a tradeoff like any other. I wonder exactly how much of that article he really "owns." At most universities, the university itself owns the IP, but the author owns the copyright. Basically it's his article, but he doesn't own the findings (i.e., he can't go to another university and publish the results he obtained using his previous university's findings/resources). Doesn't mean it doesn't happen...

4) Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC? Maybe he signed an agreement waiver which was worded to contradict his CC license?

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Ardeaem]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.
I agree (mostly) with your other points, but this one shows a misconception of how the scientific world works. There are several problems with your idea:

First, researchers' careers rely on publishing in good journals. When you go on the job market, or when you are up for tenure, the committees look at the quality of the journals you have published in. While it is not unheard of to start a new journal for a new niche field, to start a journal just to avoid publishing in bigger-named journals would be career suicide for many, many researchers.

Second (and this is related to the first point), your research has much more impact when it is published in higher impact journals. If you have good research, you publish in the journals that your peers publish in, and that helps your research get disseminated. It is hard to get others to even see your research otherwise (of course there are conferences, etc, but you get the picture).

If you want to do good research, you don't have time to START a journal. Say you're a researcher. You typically have classes to teach, graduate students to advise, research to do and write up, grants to apply for, and all kinds of other random BS. Do you REALLY want to (and can you) start a new journal, find a suitable group of editors, compile a list of peer reviewers, start a website to accept submissions, and then play the role of head editor? No. You want to do research. It would be a colossal waste of time and effort to start a new journal.

Here is a better approach: Since researchers typically publish in more than one journal, put pressure on the journals to change their policies. Tell them you will start publishing in other journals of comparable quality with better policies if they don't. Get your fellow researchers to do the same. Also, decline to peer-review for journals with bad policies. Without peer-reviewers, a journal dies.

And, while you're at it, get them to stop asking for dreadful MS documents.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[cheater512]

If you RTFS, you would see that he used the non-commercial CC licence.
That means that they cant sell it which they are doing.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[shellbeach]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end. *laughs* ... you've clearly never worked in academia if you're serious about that idea. You need high-impact publications to survive these days - it's not the acknowledgement from your peers that matters, it's the acknowledgement from the granting bodies that provide the research funding!

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[eiapoce]

If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Unfortunately it is not so easy. It's not that scientists and researchers are desperately looking for a publisher without a reason.

The reason is that in order to have your work recognised at academic level it has to be published throught them! In other words if you resarch and make dicoveries for 100 "units of work" and manage to get only 10 published then your measured value is the same as the guy who made 10 units and made that 10 published.

Don't want to say a something wrong but do I recall that there is a program already that computes your "reputation" by means of cross referencing the nuber of times that your work is mentioned in other papers.

Enrico

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[UbuntuDupe]

The reason is, a big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level of prestige of the journals that they can get their papers published in.

Yes, I'm aware of this. That's the entire point. Researchers want to get into more prestigious journals. But why is big-publisher-endorsed journal X, vetted by scientific committee Y, more prestigious (more respected, more often-cited) than a non-big-publisher-endorsed journal, vetted by the same committee Y? Because scientists perpetuate that practice. Because they (as I said in the original post) refuse to dignify journals that don't have the endorsement of a big publisher, regardless of scientific merit, big publishers are free to extort all the concessions (fees, rights to the work) that they want.

The problem is scientists, not big publishers.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[cyclop]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

That's why people have created PLOS. As a scientist, I can tell you that building a career only with public access journals is next to impossible, today. However public access journals/approaches are growing fast, so maybe in the future what you are suggesting will be entirely possible.

The document is free to read

[LiquidCoooled]

The document is available to read as both text and pdf.
I understand his worrying, but to me the biggest WTF is:

He works for one Cambridge university, he published his document to its biggest rival (Oxford) and they expect US dollars for a totally English transaction.

I say, off with their heads.

Re:The document is free to read

[drunkahol]

The greater travesty for these bastions of English society would have been a charge in Euros!

D

Re:The document is free to read

[megaditto]

I would much rather pay $50 than GBP 50 or even EU 50.

Re:The document is free to read

[jd]

Cambridge was founded by a bunch of criminals escaping from Oxford in the 7th century. Maybe Oxford is simply charging the interest on the fines.

Re:The document is free to read

[Petrushka]

Cambridge was founded by a bunch of criminals escaping from Oxford in the 7th century.

Please get your facts right. As a Cambridge alumnus myself, I have some pride in my alma mater.

13th century, not 7th.

Re:The document is free to read

[Virgil Tibbs]

especially with current conversion rate... its -very- good for those with £££

Re:The document is free to read

[soliptic]

Wish I had points to sling you a funny mod. (fwiw, I grew up in Cambridge, then my sister went to Oxford, so I know all about their history and rivalry)

Two Ideas

[JamesP]

1 - If it is your own paper, you surely have a backup somewhere, or a dead tree version of it (maybe a draft, but still)

2 - Sue the fuckers.

Re:Two Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't be able to get a lot of money out of it, as he was giving it away for free his damages would be minimal. Should be able to force them to stop selling it for sure though.

Re:Two Ideas

[mabhatter654]

If it's creative commons licensed, it should be available from their site for free as well. That's the issue with scientific papers being "fee for view" in a nutshell. The publishers are so used to gathering papers from universities that they just gobbled it up and slapped a price tag on it without even looking at the license. It's their "right" as academic publishers to do this. (just like it's a college student's right to put free-to-air shows on pirate bay! after all the TV station didn't charge for it!)

Re:Two Ideas

[Bazman]

I'm guessing you've never seen an academic's desk before...

Re:Two Ideas

[everphilski]

Difference here though is that the author has to fill out a license-to-publish which explicitly states they grant OUP the right to charge for their services. Can't publish in the journal without that form.

Re:Two Ideas

[JamesP]

I'm guessing you've never seen an academic's desk before...

Yes, I have... And they didn't have much trouble finding stuff in it.

No surprise.

[SatanicPuppy]

I'm sure they think that the inordinate burden of, you know, putting it on a website, justifies charging everyone 50 bucks to read it.

What really begs the question is, where the hell does that money go, if not to the author of the article? I'm no lawyer, but I know enough to know that it is wildly illegal to make money off of someone else's copyrighted works without their permission. Time for a nice lawsuit.

Re:No surprise.

[AFairlyNormalPerson]

It's fairly normal practice for the author (or the author's institution)
to pay the publisher for publishing the article - not the other way around.
This, however, isn't paying a kickback, like, "yeah my article sucks, but
here's $100 if you publish it anyways". There are so many articles and
publishers own so many journals that they'd probably go broke. It's not
like this is Reader's Digest; the audience is pretty much limited to
academic institutions.

Re:No surprise.

[SatanicPuppy]

The way copyright works is you offer up a certain number of reproductions and a list of formats to which you are granting the rights for publishing...e.g You sell the first and second printing rights to a company, and they have to come and renegotiate if they want to do a third printing. Now, you can give up all your rights...This is not uncommon, especially these days, but the writer in question specifically states that he maintains the copyright on his work.

Now, either he's mistaken, and there is nothing he can do about it, or he does still own the copyright, and is absolutely entitled to his share of the profits.

Re:No surprise.

[Mr. Underbridge]

What really begs the question is, where the hell does that money go, if not to the author of the article?

Depends. Maintaining an editing, peer review, production and publication system does cost money, print or online. Aside from that, there's a distinction between journals put out by non-profit organizations (like the American Chemical Society) and for-profit publishers (like Elsevier).

The societies often use journal publication as a moneymaker to support other efforts, which are often philanthropic. ACS, for instance, does a lot to support chemistry education K-12 and other efforts as well. I believe many of them also give discounts to academic institutions. On the other hand, the for-profit publishers are in the business of making money, and charge what the market will bear. For that reason, many researchers prefer to use society-based publishers.

Re:No surprise.

[Miraba]

"What really begs the question is, where the hell does that money go, if not to the author of the article?"

That money goes the copy editors, the people who actually understand the proper usage of the phrase "to beg the question." </snark>

Can't he sue them

[kalirion]

Can't he sue them for copyright infringement?

YEAH!

[Anonymous Coward]

YEAH! Lets rise up and help our fellow nerds!!

This is one case where suing is appropriate

[QuesarVII]

Sue them for the money they have made off your copyrighted work. Should be a slam dunk in court.

I would be pretty upset too

[Anonymous Coward]

if someone priced something in dollars to a UK researcher for a UK university in the UK

Re:I would be pretty upset too

[VJ42]

I'm a Brit; I'd much rather pay $50 than £50 though...

What Tax Dollars?

[Khel]

Your tax dollars do not pay for vetting of the paper. Vetting the paper by peers is what still makes this a valuable service.

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[kebes]

Your tax dollars do not pay for vetting of the paper. Vetting the paper by peers is what still makes this a valuable service.

This argument comes up every time there is an open-access debate. So allow me to address it, again.

The authors write the papers, and do not receive any pay from the journal for that. The journal editors then forward the paper to reviewers. The reviewers are volunteers, not paid by the journal. Then the editors forward the paper (if accepted) to a typesetter, and it is published.

The authors and the reviewers are academics, who basically give their time to the journals. Their salaries come from government grants, from university funds (which come from tuition), and to some extent from corporate collaborations.

The salaries of the editors and typesetters are paid by the journal subscription charges. The subscriptions come primarily from academic libraries in universities or government research institutes. (Which are, again, funded by government grants and university funds.)

So, a very large percent of the money flowing into the journal comes from public funds (taxes). Significantly, the peer reviewers are volunteers, with their actual salaries coming largely from public funds. In a very real sense, our tax dollars are indeed paying for vetting the paper. The "valuable service" of which you speak is not performed by the journal, but by the academics (who do not benefit in any way from the toll-access that the journals impose).

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. And it's worth adding that typesetting scientific and math papers was once very expensive skilled work. But with electronic submissions it's now done by the authors, with maybe a little tidying up by the journal. Commercial journals add almost no value.

Which is why people are setting up peer-reviewed open-access online journals. For example, the well respected Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.

Before the internet, paper journals offered several real services. They are just friction now. Don't use them.

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Miraba]

Hi, I work at a scientific publisher. If you consider professional editing to be of "no value," you're obviously unfamiliar with what many papers look like when they're accepted.

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely, have you seen the stuff on Arxiv? It's so different from what gets... oh wait, no. No it isn't. Your 'professional editing' is just making it fit on dead trees, and you often screw that up.

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Miraba]

Free, online-only publications can be fine, but professional editing can be necessary for authors who don't speak English as a first language. It can also be necessary for authors who do speak English as a first language.

We just make it fit on dead trees? Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems is online-only. Every other journal that AGU publishes is also offered online. We "often" screw up formatting of print copies? Show me some scanned pages with botched formatting and compare that to the number of total pages we've published.

Go away, troll. Commercial publishers will be around for a long time.

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, but its value bears little relation to what the publishers charge for it. Some journals are so expensive that it would be cheaper to download the papers for free (if that was possible) and pay an editor to tidy up the ones you were interested in than to pay a subscription for the edited journal. This is unsustainable.

FWIW, I'm the original GP AC.

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Miraba]

Ah, for-profit publishers. I'm all for making a profit when it comes to fiction and most non-fiction, but profiting off of research that receives public funding is ridiculous. I would like a model where the government directly funds the scientific societies, but I don't see any way that's going to change, at least in the US. I can see how it might gain work with a country that isn't so afraid of socialism, but that still wouldn't affect the biggest publishers, not to mention the logistics of a society with international members.

Your thoughts?

Re:What Tax Dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that government funding seems unlikely. However, universities already spend millions on journals, but by giving the money to the for-profit publishers they are, in my opinion, squandering it. If they could be persuaded to spend a small portion of their library budgets on hiring editors for free journals, everybody would win. Universities already provide "altruistic" services, such as hosting the free online journals that are appearing, so I don't think it's such a leap.

As others have mentioned in this article, the really expensive journals only continue to exist because of their prestige. Free journals suffer from the same kind of snobbery as open source software: "you get what you pay for". But I'd hope, particularly if free journals could get funding from universities, that it would only be a matter of time before these perceptions changed.

On the other hand, only academics can change the system. Free journals only succeed with the support of luminaries in their field. As long as the current system, for all its flaws, isn't causing them too much pain it will probably continue.

Typical Cambridge whinger

[BadAnalogyGuy]

First, it's not surprising that Rust is befuddled here. He is a Cambridge professor. You might as well ask a Wellesley grad to explain gender roles.

Second, Oxford isn't selling his work. It's selling access to his work. If he published his work anywhere else under the license which he claims, then that work would still be fully accessible, sans $48.

Stick with the chemistry, doc! Understanding the law isn't for you.

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[Creepy Crawler]

Well, why dont you try reading what the CC (no commercial benefit) means.

What right does Oxford have to copy his work? If they did not work out a deal with him or his university, they, by default use the CC license.

The CC license he chose has "No Commercial Use" clause. They used it for commercial use, thereby making void their usage of the CC for copyright.

They are in violation of Rust's copyright. Hmm... if Rust can prove they did it in spite of CC (no com use), he probably can get treble damages...

Treble damages = $48 * 3 * n

Big number. Good.

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Please tell me that you were wearing a top hat and a monocle when you wrote this post.

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[B_SharpC]

Spend $20,000 suing them so you can get your $48 back.
 
Taxpayers are supporting your fanny anyhow. We should be suing his fanny.

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, why dont you try reading what the CC (no commercial benefit) means.
Just because he's released the article under CC, does not mean he hasn't also released it to another group under a commercial license.

What right does Oxford have to copy his work? If they did not work out a deal with him or his university, they, by default use the CC license.
I haven't found the specific article in question, but presumably, he submitted it for publication in an OUP journal. This act include assignment of the right (sometimes, not exclusive) to publish the work to the journal.

It is possible for the same work to be released under multiple licenses to multiple parties, and Rust should not be surprised if OUP is exercising their right to charge of the article under the terms of their copyright assignment.

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[Anonymous Coward]

Treble damages = $48 * 3 * n where n > 0 (If he is very lucky)

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[Creepy Crawler]

Try reading what I have posted here.

And like I said, I do not know if he allowed his content to go under another license. I'm just following what he claims.

And also, he may have made a deal for commercial works that we know not of.

I also have found the links directly to Oxfords pages. You simply click on the "Full text FREE" link. If one would miss that, then perhaps they ought to get a job doing fries or bagging at a grocery.

However, Ingenta is charging illegally. I have posted those links around here. Just look at my posting history.

Re:Typical Cambridge whinger

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

If the RIAA can get damages without any infringing copies being made (and in this case there are almost certainly some) why can't he?

Anyway, statutory damages don't require showing harm or unjust profits.

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Place links in multiple places throughout paper to free access site.
2. Make sure Google indexes this free site.
3. Don't profit!

WIthout permission?

[posterlogo]

I've published a couple papers/seen a few through the publication process. Almost all journals either publish free after 1 year/6 months, allow you to post your work (in a slightly altered pre-publication "draft" format) in Pubmed central, or can grant you free access to your own paper on demand.

That he didn't know all this going into it is highly questionable. Most scientists know perfectly well that a condition of publication in most journals is that you grant the journal exclusive copyright on the published form of the paper, but not on the intellectual content within.

And

[everphilski]

5) Unless he's careless about backups, he has a damn copy on his computer at home. He can read his paper for free.

But the real meat-and-potatoes is point #2. You chose to submit it to said journal. Live with the consequences. (I don't condemn publishing in journals - but they aren't the only method of getting the word out, and after submitting your article to a journal it certainly does not curtail you from sharing results with others via other avenues)

Re:And

[mikael]

I am sure that if he went in to see the library staff, they would be able to give him an Athens login account, and that would allow him to to read his article for free. These are free for any staff or student who is working at a UK university.

This seems to be more of an issue of central services not being informed of which journals they should be subscribing to.

Re:And

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

What are backups?

And does Google cache count? :)

Re:And

[iocat]

I think it's worth RTFA and the Oxford response in his comments section. Pasted below:

Dear Dr Murray-Rust

I would like to respond to your post entitled, 'OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article' (September 3rd 2007).

It is not Oxford Journals' policy to charge any users for downloading and using Open Access articles for non-commercial purposes. As stated in the copyright line, all Oxford Open articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/ ) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Rightslink functionality should not be appearing on any of our OA articles, and we are in the process of removing it. For Nucleic Acids Research, the links are not displaying on tables of contents with immediate effect, and will be removed from all article pages as soon as possible. For the OA content in journals participating in Oxford Open, we will also remove any references to Rightslink. In addition to the existing copyright line and the embedded machine-readable licence, we will also display the Creative Commons logo to help make the licence terms clearer to users.

For clarification, it has never been our policy to charge our own authors for the re-use of their material in the continuation of their own research and wider educational purposes, and this includes authors of articles published under a subscription model.

Kind regards

Kirsty Luff
Senior Communications and Marketing Manager
Oxford Journals

So, maybe not quite as sinister as it appears.

Re:And

[owlstead]

Should we tag this as "oops"? Might be a good way to show that this might be an (unintentional) mistake...

Re:And

[Scrameustache]

not quite as sinister as it appears. Well, from your quote, this appears to be a sorting mistake on the website which is being corrected by the responsible party once it has been informed of their error.

Now how are going to get a good flamewar going with this kind of rational attitude? The people want to pick a bad guy and to ridicule him, either the author who wants his rights respected or the publisher who wants to collect money for their output... if they're both in agreement over the error and they make it right, then we can't pick sides and argue endlessly! We might *gasp* have to go back to our own jobs!

Re:And

[KGIII]

This is /. so we can just make it up as we go along if we want. Someone will come along shortly to say how it should have been a different license instead of CC though they might have already as I haven't read all of the responses yet.

Re:And

[iocat]

Also, it APPEARS to be an error on Oxford's part. But maybe Oxford is sinisterly creating these errors. Maybe it's all a big conspiracy... And any denial of the conspiracy simply provides yet more evidence of it.

Re:And

[budgenator]

That is not the point, the authors published under the CC-NC license, Oxford has no right to distribute the work commercially. By distributing a work that they has no right to distribute Oxford has stolen the work and not only should any of the ill-gotten gains made by Oxford be transfered to the Authors, they maybe entitled to other damages. Oxford maybe liable for criminal or civil damages; it's not a matter of being able to get the article for free, it's a matter that making anyone is illegal; of course IANAL, but if were one of the Authors I'd be calling one.

Re:And

[Idaho]

But the real meat-and-potatoes is point #2. You chose to submit it to said journal. Live with the consequences. (I don't condemn publishing in journals - but they aren't the only method of getting the word out, and after submitting your article to a journal it certainly does not curtail you from sharing results with others via other avenues)

Uhm. In order for said journal to publish it, you need to explicitly sign a copyright form such as this one (or similar) which gives them the right to even reproduce (publish) your work. If they do not have this, they have no rights whatsoever to publish and/or distribute your work - even less, ask money for doing so.

It's copyright infringement - simple as that. Your sending them the paper does not transfer the copyright to anyone in any way. Copyright transfers cannot happen implicitly (e.g. as an implied condition understood to be accepted by submitting to the journal). They need explicit, written confirmation.

Re:And

[leuk_he]

from TFA

But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access.

It all is a routine, until they are caught, in which case they say "oops". They better try this not on legal students who care.

Cleary they did not go by CC license, which makes "This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License." Thus they will have to pay Peter murray for copyright, and fast! I bet they have a standard fee for unlimited online relicencing....

Re:And

[kocsonya]

The problem is, if you do not publish, you don't get grants. At least in Australia, that's how it works. When you apply for a research grant, you have to state how many articles have you published in what journal and if you were first author, senior (last) author or just an in-between. The journal is also important, the Mooville Bovine Health Weekly is somewhat less worthy than an article in Nature, for example.

The publishers are very well aware of that, that's why they can demand money and rights from you when they publish *your* results. They can also keep readership up with some trickery. For example, if you have a big international science organisation with loads of members that runs a journal but the journal just gets a tad expensive for a lot of members, then you can make journal subscription be free for members and increase the membership fee by the journal cost (yes, it's from real life, not a hypothetical example).

So, quite often submitting your article to a particular journal is not really up to you, it's a necessity if you want to work on your stuff next year too. You could put all your results onto a webserver instead of paying a journal to publish it. While that would help the scientific community it would definitely be bad for your budget, for chances are, you won't have one next year...

Of course, probably depending on your discipline things might vary, the above is certainly true to (publicly funded) biomed science.

Re:And

[rucs_hack]

actually, they charge access to their indexing service. The papers, all papers, are expensive as a result.

I don't like it. My papers are in several, and I had to search for ages to get a copy of one I co authored, of which I didn't have the final accepted version. Many such indexing systems also fund conferences, from which they take the resultant papers. They are, alas, a service its hard to do without.

Unless an open access system is properly funded, it won't be able to compete with such academic paper indexing systems. Searching by title isn't enough, you need abstracts, citations, 'also cited by' sections, stuff like that, which all costs money.

Re:And

[shellbeach]

from TFA

But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access.

It all is a routine, until they are caught, in which case they say "oops". They better try this not on legal students who care. I can't read TFA at the moment as it's been apparently /.ed, but I'm calling bullshit on this one. In the field I work in (molecular biology), there are a number of open access journals, and I've never been asked to pay for an article from any of them.

Re:And

[everphilski]

Tenure too. Tenure is all about research (how many published, peer-reviewed papers?), money brought in and teaching. Although you need to do all three, emphasis is placed on the former.

Honestly, I don't have a problem with it (peer-reviewed journals). I've published before (AIAA, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) and I'm working on doing it again (Master's and Ph.D. work). Their rates are reasonable, in my opinion, ($25 a paper to read... if it looks worth reading I can afford that, or get work to pay for it) and in their field they are **the** source. They also have killer student discounts for conferences... $40, which is peanuts compared to the professional registration rate :)

Re:And

[Buran]

Perhaps they are referring to the occasional exception of "you must pay"? I've seen articles in major journals that are tagged as "free for all to read" even when it is normally the case that articles newer than, say, a year have to be paid for.

I think I've seen it in PNAS and Science, but I haven't kept a running tally. Usually it's articles of massive public interest that have seen wide coverage in the "lay press".

Re:And

[shellbeach]

Perhaps they are referring to the occasional exception of "you must pay"? I've seen articles in major journals that are tagged as "free for all to read" even when it is normally the case that articles newer than, say, a year have to be paid for.

I think I've seen it in PNAS and Science, but I haven't kept a running tally. Usually it's articles of massive public interest that have seen wide coverage in the "lay press". Well, PNAS seems open access: I can download a paper from the latest edition easily enough ...

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0703707104v1

Re:And

[Buran]

Now that you mention that, I think they recently changed their policy on when papers are freely available. Good for them; even if the open access movement isn't universally accepted, it's making some journals change their policies.

I admire the Public Library of Science, however, for fully supporting open access (and in fact being founded to promote it). You still pay to publish there, but anyone can read any paper in any of the PLoS journals.

Re:And

[rtb61]

Well come a little bit closer, and whoops I'll hit you on the head with a mallet, I'll say sorry, you'll eventually heal and all is OK, but don't stand to close in the future, cause, whoops, I'm, likely to do it again, whoops, and again, don't worry I'll say sorry each and every time so no harm done.

When individuals do it, they get sued and pay heavy penalties to companies, when companies do it they expect to say sorry to individuals, walk away from it and be free to do it again in the future.

Re:And

[mrchaotica]

By distributing a work that they has no right to distribute Oxford has stolen the work...

No, Oxford has copyright-infringed the work. "Stealing" and "copyright infringment" still aren't the same thing, even though the "good guys" are on the opposite side than usual this time. We've gotta be consistent, you know -- it's only fair.

Re:And

[budgenator]

It's still stealing, the theft isn't the physical paper,
The theft is the theft of the right to distribute and the right of fair-use for academic purposes.

Re:And

[mrchaotica]

The theft is the theft of the right to distribute...

Right, except that "rights" (or rather in this case, permissions issued by the government) aren't physical objects and can't be stolen. Thus, misappropriation of distribution rights is instead called "copyright infringment."

Besides, they are fundamentally different things, you know: in one case, the owner is physically deprived of a particular physical instance of a thing. In the other, the copyright holder (note: the word "owner" is inappropriate here) is not deprived of anything at all, but the perpetrator overcomes a prohibition. While "stealing" is empirically and unequivocably wrong -- since the thief gains exactly as much as the rightful owner loses it's a zero-sum game, and thus the owner should retain his claim to ownership -- the ethics of "copyright infringment" are up for debate. In a sense, the copyright holder loses nothing while the infringer gains: a net benefit and a boon for society. However, as a society we've chosen to discourage it on the theory that giving the copyright holder exclusive distribution privilages encourages the creation of new works (a dubious assumption given the excessive duration of copyright; this logic made much more sense when an artist couldn't expect to fund an entire estate on the residuals).

Anyway, the point is that "theft" and "copyright infringment" are two very different things. This is a fact, and an issue of legal definition. Regardless of your opinion or moral position, it's not negotiable. Period. (Am I making myself clear?) To conflate them only indicates to me that you either don't understand the issue, or are trying to use inflammatory language to make an (entirely worthless) appeal to emotion instead of arguing rationally. Neither is helpful, so please quit using the wrong word!

Re:And

[tehcyder]

While "stealing" is empirically and unequivocably wrong -- since the thief gains exactly as much as the rightful owner loses it's a zero-sum game, and thus the owner should retain his claim to ownership

That doesn't make sense. If stealing were in fact a zero-sum game, then it would be morally neutral. Why should the owner retain his claim to ownership if no-one loses out over all? Why should society care either way?

Oh, and stealing is not unequivocably wrong. If someone has to steal food to live (say in a war zone), it would be absurd to say they were wrong.

Re:And

[mrchaotica]

That doesn't make sense. If stealing were in fact a zero-sum game, then it would be morally neutral. Why should the owner retain his claim to ownership if no-one loses out over all? Why should society care either way?

Sorry, I was trying to be concise and overshot the mark. The point I was trying to make was that in the absence of economic loss or gain, the moral implications (i.e., the idea that the owner had an inherent right to the object because he's the one who worked to get it in the first place) prevail.

Oh, and stealing is not unequivocably wrong. If someone has to steal food to live (say in a war zone), it would be absurd to say they were wrong.

No, they're still wrong; they're just wrong with extenuating circumstances.

Re:And

[russotto]

Oh, and stealing is not unequivocably wrong. If someone has to steal food to live (say in a war zone), it would be absurd to say they were wrong.

You think? What if the original owner of the food died of starvation as a result of having the food stolen?

Re:And

[rts008]

By far the most definitive post on this subject I've seen yet

Well done!

Made With The Cheapest Communist Labor

[Anonymous Coward]

Impeach Bush With a Chinese DDOS FP!

Losers.

Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC

[benhocking]

That was exactly my first thought. The only end result I see is OUP being more careful to reject such papers in the future.

Re:Hold the Sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh yes, because, as we all know, Slashdot Editors are renowned for their restraint in publishing non-sensationalist topics/articles...

You Must Be New Here ;)

-AC

Next time, send them a copy.

[seebs]

Always keep a copy of your work before sending one off to the publisher. :)

Re:Next time, send them a copy.

[Anonymous Coward]

next time.... RTA (understand it) before you comment
[i know its hard to break the tradition...but...]

What surprises me ....

[Anonymous Coward]

is that they charge him in dollars, while the currency in England is pounds?

I guess the almighty dollar is just ubiquitous. Or is it that they like paying less and less for their access over there?

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Ramble]

Without state funded research into relativity (something that appears uselss to the market) we wouldn't have accurate GPS and other accurate measuring systems. Science cannot be judged by the market becuase the market cannot predict what is useful in the realm of the unknown.

google works with them as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Search any more-interesting scientific subject on google and you'll get tens and tens of PDF links with excerpts. When you enter them they ask you money. How come they rank #1..#100 in google and with the nice PDF link? These days it's almost impossible to find anything related to a scientific concept on google that does not take you to a pay-link. Thank you google.

Re:google works with them as well

[Sigismundo]

I've always wondered about this. It happens too with message boards where you have to register to see the content which appears in plain text in Google's synopsis.

I'm not sure if Google is in on it or not. I wonder if some websites requiring registration or some kind of fee are set to recognize Google's spiders and allow them free access.

Re:google works with them as well

[orkysoft]

I'm not sure if Google is in on it or not. I wonder if some websites requiring registration or some kind of fee are set to recognize Google's spiders and allow them free access.

I'm pretty sure that's what's happening. You can find out whether it's true by changing your browser id to the same id that Google uses (unless they recognize IP addresses as well, but that's always iffy).

Not Surprising

[phobos13013]

Well, academia of all places is expected to create this kind of controversy. Access to research paper is one of the most restricted information sources there is! Mostly because there really isnt a market share for people wanting to read about Health Effects Engineering or some other random technical issue. Meanwhile, the whole world is interested in illegally sharing the new Transformers movie, regardless of its quality.

Also, the fact that it was released under the CC license, does this limit his legal ability to sue? Is there case law to support the CC license as a legally-binding rule internationally?

You always have the option of submitting your paper to the PLoS if it follows the applicable guidelines.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[dada21]

Without state funded research into relativity (something that appears uselss to the market) we wouldn't have accurate GPS and other accurate measuring systems. Science cannot be judged by the market because the market cannot predict what is useful in the realm of the unknown.

And you know this how?

Ground-based GPS has been around as long as triangulation has, it just wasn't a product that consumers wanted when it was available. It wasn't BECAUSE of government research that we have GPS, it was because the market demanded it as the discoveries were made.

I find it ridiculous that people think that just because government-research paid for SOME discoveries that those same discoveries wouldn't exist in a market economy. Not only would they exist, but we'd have even more research produced as people are challenged to be the first to market with a product.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[thegnu]

If some poor researcher loses funding, and industry realizes they had something good to say or study, they'll get the money quick enough, plus they can decide who to offer it to and at what price.
The only issue is that there ARE legitimate research projects that nobody will pay for because they don't have a definite payoff. Or a high probability of working. Now, I agree that the govt grant thing is a little ridiculous as I know someone who essentially studied to be a grant writer, but it's even more extreme than the current implementation to cut all funding.

Does someone have a list of govt funded research we currently take for granted?

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[SlappyBastard]

QUOTE: How about instead of "freeing up" research based on money that is stolen, we just stop the steal-and-pay mentality of government research grants, and let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?

I find this funny considering you're posting this comment on the INTERNET of all places.

Research requires patronage. And that patronage will fund a lot of broken and useless crap.

Also, the efficient markets theory isn't true. Companies fund tons of useless, unmarketable crap, too. Look at half the semiconductor and pharm industries.

A lot of research is useless. But you don't always know until you get in there and see what things really do. And people do abuse the system. It doesn't matter what system you use. Every system is prone to abuse because there will always being people looking to abuse the system. All the market does is give capitalist interests an excuse to claim their abuses are profitable and therefore no one should bitch because the consumer gets to foot the bill.

Think about market-driven research itself before thinking it is so great. Some monkey actually sat down and built the actuarial tables and policies that today are screwing up the healthcare system and making sure that even people who have insurance somehow don't get procedures covered. Yep. Market-driven research really did a lot of good there.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Alioth]

With that kind of attitude, we would still all be living in caves.

Research into quantum physics would have seemed useless with no market value when it was started. However, 50 years later, without that research, there would have been no transistors. How big is the semiconductor market today? 50 years before it even existed, no capitalist could have forseen the use of the research. There is a very good case for researching things that may have no market value for decades.

Ever heard of

[Bootle]

http://www.arxiv.org/?

Re:Ever heard of

[ShoeHead]

Most of the papers posted on Arxiv (especially the ones from otherwise untrusted
scientists I am willing to believe) are in the exact format of the journal it
will be accepted in. Arxiv papers benefit from the industry of peer-reviewed
journals, even if they are nominally free.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to see you say that when you get hit by an 'incurable' disease. Hmm... who's trying to develop cures for those corner cases?

Story Overblown

[nodrogluap]

You can access the article from the OUP web site for free (CC-NL with attribution), and additionally it is available from PubMed Central at the NIH. I don't know how we got that popup asking him for money to use it in a classroom, but it is probably just a mistake. Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from asking you to pay for something that's free, if you're a sucker. Once again, the whole article is right there to read, with the CC license right at the top. BTW, OUP has both Open Access and non-open access journals, so I can see how a common document delivery system could get screwed up. Not that it should, but you could see how. Hopefully they will correct it, I've published Open Access and non-Open Access papers with OUP and they are pretty responsive on both the technical and editorial sides.

Publish in PLOS

[GAATTC]

One way to completely avoid the issue of commercial scientific publishers is to publish in an open access journal such as one of the Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/ journals.

The open access model works as follows: "Open Access: Everything we publish is freely available online for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish." Pretty straight forward.

As an author you pay a small amount to support the publication of the journal - often smaller than the cost for color pages at a commercial journal, and then your work is freely available. These are high quality journals and are one important part of the free future of scientific publishing. The more people who make this choice, the more pressure there will be on the traditional journals to open up their content if they want to survive.

Full Text, only $48 dollars or 5 mod points

[Creepy Crawler]

OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article

I have been dismayed (previous post: "Open Access") at the lack of commitment to OA by mainstream (primarily toll-access (TA)) publishers and have described this as a "systemic failure" of the industry. Here is another unacceptable lack of clarity and commitment from an Open Access journal from a major publisher. I had been investigating OUP's site for another reason (PRISM: Open Letter to Oxford University Press) and since I had published with them thought I would have a look at papers I had written ("I" and "my" include co-authors). This is what I found (screenshot):

The Image in the blog entry stating $48 cost

The electronic article is accompanied by a sidebar with "request permissions". I followed this and the result is shown above. The journal wishes to charge me 48 USD to:

        * USE MY OWN ARTICLE
        * ON WHICH I HOLD COPYRIGHT
        * FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES (TEACHING)

The journal is therefore

        * SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
        * WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
        * AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)

I am lost for words... ... the only charitable conclusion I can draw is that the publisher ritually attaches the awful Rightslink page to every article automatically and that this is a genuine mistake. I have found such "genuine mistakes" with other publishers in their hybrid journals (i.e. where only some of the papers are OA, the majority being toll-access TA). But this is a fully OA journal - all papers are OA - I assume CC-NC. There is no excuse for including the Rightslink page on ANY OA paper, let alone every one on a journal.

If this is - as I desperately hope - a genuine mistake then my criticism might seem harsh. But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access. And I hope that OUP can and will clarify and rectify the position. If, however, it is deliberate and that the publisher actually intends to charge readers and users for Open Access articles I shall reserve comment.

This is not a trivial point. The normal reader of a journal who wishes to re-use material has to navigate copyright constraints and restrictions on an all-too-frequent basis. Such a reader, especially if they were relatively unaware of Open Access could easily pay the journal for "permission to use an Open Access article for teaching". (Note that other charges are higher - to include my own article in a book I write would cost nearly 350 USD).

It is all indicative of an industry that simply isn't trying hard enough.
RECOMMENDATION:

OPEN ACCESS ARTICLES ON PUBLISHERS' WEB PAGES SHOULD NEVER BE ACCOMPANIED BY RIGHTSLINK OR OTHER PERMISSION MATERIAL. INSTEAD THE PUBLISHER SHOULD PRO-ACTIVELY POINT OUT THE NATURE OF OA AND ENSURE THAT THE READER AND RE-USER IS FULLY AWARE OF THEIR RIGHTS.

After all, the author has paid for this...

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under open issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Re:Full Text, only $48 dollars or 5 mod points

[Creepy Crawler]

Ok...

Here's the Oxford website in question: Here

Try clicking on full text. You get full text without rightslink garbage.

If you look through the source for copyright.com (as seen in image), it's related to a javascript and is onclick a certain element that is NOT in the site.

After reading this, it seems an honest mistake.

Scholar.google does have 3 other sources for this document.

Ingenta DOES require payment in the line of $36.97 to view this. Hmm.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[smallfries]

It wasn't BECAUSE of government research that we have GPS, it was because the market demanded it as the discoveries were made.

You couldn't be more wrong unless you are somehow counting research performed by the US military as some kind of market force...

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[blahplusplus]

"How about instead of "freeing up" research based on money that is stolen, we just stop the steal-and-pay mentality of government research grants, and let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?"

Because the market knows the price of everything, but the VALUE of nothing. The market is not some panacea. NASA and other space agencies would never have existed becauase the "market perspective" would never get involved in projects who's risk is high and whose return on investment scopes are beyond small minded petty capitalist human lifetimes.

The Document Is Free, What Is He On About?

[_bug_]

The page on OUP's website that the Rust is on about is located here. As you can plainly see on the right-hand of the screen this document is available, FOR FREE, in PDF format. In fact, here's a direct link to said PDF on OUP's website.

What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.

My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.

Rust is really making a lot of fuss over nothing.

Re:The Document Is Free, What Is He On About?

[maubp]

I agree that this a big fuss over nothing - the slashdot title doesn't help either.

If you read the footer of the "quick quote" page (cropped in the article screen shot), it even tells you that the quote is for commerial use, and that because this is an open access CC article it doesn't need to be licenced for non-commerial use.

The third party www.copyright.com site could be a lot more up front about this of course!

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[dada21]

I find this funny considering you're posting this comment on the INTERNET of all places.

I started my first telecom business as a BBS when I was 11 years old. The Internet may have been a government-started entity, but it was the market that provided what we have today. Heck, I had an X.25 network in my house in my teen years before I could get a decent Internet connection -- and X.25 worked wonderfully for interconnection before the market started providing T1s and ISDL to those willing to foot the bill. The government-designed Internet was not an efficient process, and it would have happened naturally soon enough through X.25 or other communication, too. Remember FidoNet? I remember when the nightly dial-ups started to disappear as more large BBSes had X.25 packet networks to connect real-time through. FidoNet was a market-provided network, and it worked fine for a long time.

Research requires patronage. And that patronage will fund a lot of broken and useless crap.

Nothing is useless, all products have markets, however large or small. Yet some "useless crap" today can be a useful treasure tomorrow, based on what each individual needs and is willing to pay for.

Also, the efficient markets theory isn't true. Companies fund tons of useless, unmarketable crap, too. Look at half the semiconductor and pharm industries.

Stepping stones to finding products and services that they can offer. All my research also helps me find a market for my solutions.

A lot of research is useless. But you don't always know until you get in there and see what things really do. And people do abuse the system. It doesn't matter what system you use. Every system is prone to abuse because there will always being people looking to abuse the system. All the market does is give capitalist interests an excuse to claim their abuses are profitable and therefore no one should bitch because the consumer gets to foot the bill.

The consumer who foots the bill is the same individual who AGREED to foot the bill. Today, taxpayers foot the bill -- taxpayers who do NOT agree to foot each particular expenditure. Consumers spending = voluntary, government taxes = theft. How hard is that to understand?

Think about market-driven research itself before thinking it is so great. Some monkey actually sat down and built the actuarial tables and policies that today are screwing up the healthcare system and making sure that even people who have insurance somehow don't get procedures covered. Yep. Market-driven research really did a lot of good there.

Sorry, my friend, but it was not the market that created the health care problem. The biggest destroyer of cheap and excellent health care in the United States was, guess who? Government, starting with the HMO Act of 1973.

who owns research

[b17bmbr]

If I work at a university and do research there, they pay the costs, etc., then does my research belong to me? It's my understanding that PhD dissertations belong to the university. And, does the same hold true at companies as well? If they are footing the bill, then do you really "own" it?

I am certainly not a lawyer, but it seems to me at least that if you do independent research, then it belongs to you. I guess the same holds true for code as well. How many profs had to sign NDA's or other copyright arrangements. Certainly, some research requires enormous capital investment and can't be conducted independently.

Re:who owns research

[Virgil Tibbs]

if i paint a picture with your paints and your paper... who owns it...?

with the university its more obvious....
you pay to go to university (in some way) you own it.

Re:who owns research

[ezdude]

No, that's not right. Most scientists get paid by the university from a combination of grant money and university funds. Grad students in science almost universally are funded by the PI (Principal Investigator), who are, in turn, funded by the government or some industry source. The only students who may "pay to do research" are 1) undergrads and 2) some Masters students, however, they rarely do as much work as PhD students or postdocs (who are also funded by the PI). Moreover, much of the infrastructure in a lab is originally acquired by startup funds, which are given by the university. Try doing research without hoods, incubators, centrifuges, refrigerators, microscopes, etc. It's not so easy. So, to the original poster of the question, the university pretty much owns the research. If you want to own your research, start a company.

Re:who owns research

[Virgil Tibbs]

(i'm not totally disagreeing) I would suggest that, in the context of this story, the scientist does have the right to licence his work under cc-nc 3.0 That isn't totally the way i though it worked (I live in the UK btw, i think you live in the USA so it may be different). The scientist has to locate funding, whether this is from the university or a commercial entity.... this is breifly discussed here in a hope #6 lecture...

Nominative determinism strikes again

[Colin Smith]

Be careful what you name your children.

Though in this case it's the family name.

Price quoted is for commerial use only!

[maubp]

Citation:
Holliday et al. (2007) MACiE (Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes): novel tools for searching catalytic mechanisms. Nucleic Acids Research, 35, Database issue D515-D520. DOI link

He's right that clicking on the right and getting a quick quote for reproducing the entire article as part of a course pack (print and/or electric) is non zero... BUT, producing a course pack doesn't allways equate to non-commerial in my mind.

It might part of university course, in which case Peter Murray-Rust seems justified in taking calling this non-commerial (and therefore free under the CC licence used).

However, the course-pack could be part of a commercial training course for members of the pharma industry - in which case the end user would have to pay the copyright holders.

The bottom of the quick quote page even EXPLAINS this (cropped in his screen shot):

If the item you are seeking permission to re-use is labeled OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE then please note that non-commercial reuse of it is according to the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license. Permission only needs to be obtained for commercial use and can be done via Rightslink. If you have any queries about re-use of content published as part of the Oxford Open program, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

What's the big fuss about?

Re:Price quoted is for commerial use only!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fuss is that the author never licensed the website to distribute commercially under *any* terms, let alone for a fee. Only the copyright holder can authorize that, and unless the author has signed the copyright over to the website, negotions for commercial use need to occur with *him*.

Re:Price quoted is for commerial use only!

[samweber]

The fuss is that the author never licensed the website to distribute commercially under *any* terms, let alone for a fee. How do you know this? The author's complaint doesn't say this -- he seems to be under the mistaken impression that the site was charging for non-commercial use, which it isn't.

Furthermore, if you look at the site's information for authors, it explicitly says that it requires a license from the authors. This license doesn't seem to be posted, but there is no reason it can't say something like "You have the rights to distribute it for free under the Creative Commons license, and to charge a fee for commercial use."

Do you have any reason to think otherwise?

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Proteus]

If some poor researcher loses funding, and industry realizes they had something good to say or study, they'll get the money quick enough, plus they can decide who to offer it to and at what price. It is no different than the guy who washes cars: if government paid him to do it, he'd be charging $100 an hour and would forget to use water.

It's true that the government grant system is poorly-managed, and that we pay a lot more than we should in many circumstances. However, research isn't only valuable as a "marketable materials" pursuit.

If we didn't have government grants, no pure research would ever be done, and the only stuff we'd be discovering would have direct marketable value. That sounds great until you realize that much of the "valuable" research that's been done depended on earlier research that didn't have any obvious value.

For example, if Michael Faraday hadn't figured out the principles of electro-magnetic radiation -- something he did just because he was curious, and which had no obvious practical value in 1831 -- we would not have had a generators, radios, and a myriad other things (like transformers) that make modern life possible.

His license doesn't matter

[everphilski]

In order to get published, you have to sign off on Oxford Journal's License to Publish:

here

and I quote:

"You agree that OUP may include the Article in an "open access" version of the Journal subject to payment of the relevant 'open access' fee or submission of a valid fee-waiver form."

You have to sign this piece of paper to submit the article. Obviously, he (or a coauthor?) did, so from my read he gave them explicit permission to seek payment.

Re:His license doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, I was about to point that out. I guess there's a off chance that someone else submitted his paper to the OUP (department head or some such), in which case his righteous indingnation is misdirected, but more than likely he didn't bother to read what he was agreeing to.

Re:His license doesn't matter

[Stephan Schulz]

"You agree that OUP may include the Article in an "open access" version of the Journal subject to payment of the relevant 'open access' fee or submission of a valid fee-waiver form."

This part is a bit confusing, but it refers to the author paying OUP to put it into an open access journal, not the reader paying to access this paper. The reader access is described on the right of that form:

"Open access" versions are made freely available online immediately upon publication as part of a long-term archive without subscription barriers to access.

Re:His license doesn't matter

[jagilbertvt]

I think you're misunderstanding this (or perhaps I am), but this is referring to a fee the author MUST pay (or provide a fee waiver).

Re:His license doesn't matter

[everphilski]

Yup, looks like I f*d up, they pay to submit and the paper is free to d/l for noncommercial use. And the publisher has already rectified the issue.

Re:His license doesn't matter

[budgenator]

Maybe they checked box "B" and annotated it creative commons non commercial

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Ramble]

Ground based GPS falls down as soon as you go out of range of the station, satellites don't have this problem. Also, GPS was originally a US military only thing, something that you paid for out of your tax dollars. I don't doubt that some discoveries would have been made if only the market contolled science (not as many most likely) but I don't feel comfortable with one super corporation holding all scientific patents. Obviously you have no understanding of how research works.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[asadodetira]

"his research is mostly useless from a market perspective".

That's why research is peer-reviewed y scientists and not marketers. If the market was to decide what's worthy of researching, only narrow areas of immediate commercial interest will be funded. Basic research such as math that's useful to do other research is not immediately useful market-wise, but necessary for overall progress of human knowledge.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if we let the market drive fundamental research our society will end up exactly as depicted in Mike Judge's movie "Idiocracy". All of the greatest minds of science will focus on drugs to treat erectile dysfunction and nothing else.

There already is a very strong profit motivation in private pharmaceutical research leaving research into treating diseases that don't affect the G7 nations as much as third world nations more or less ignored.

But that said, it's probably just fine with some people if all research was directed towards improving the lives of only those who can pay. Fair is fair, right? You were lucky enough to be born into a family who can afford to pay, so screw everyone else. That's the American way! Yee-Haw!

Taxes?

[PhreakOfTime]

isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?

Wrong. Most of you're taxes pay for the interest on the national debt. Everything beyond that is 'paid for' through deficit financing. Mostly by selling US bonds to china as a result of the trade imbalance.

while I support the argument of open access to information, your methodologies leave much to be desired. Paying taxes doesnt give you a 'right' to anything. Anymore than paying a gas tax gives you a 'right' to go as fast as you want on public roads.

Re:Taxes?

[Teancum]

While I would agree with your general statement that the largest single expenditure in the U.S. federal budget is for paying interest on the national debt, I disagree with your analogy strongly... and the ultimate conclusion you are coming to here.

In the case of public highways, there is no restriction on who can use them... or even if you have paid highway taxes for their use. You do have a "right" to use a public highway, but there may be some restrictions on its use such as a speed limit, minimum vehicle requirements (such as a certain lighting scheme if you drive it at night, turn signals, etc.), vehicle type restrictions (operating a bicycle on an interstate highway is prohibited), demonstrations of skills required to operate the vehicle you are using (aka a license with endorsements depending on vehicle), and if you have committed various kinds of crimes... particularly traffic law violations. Nearly all traffic laws have been established due to people being idiots and causing substantial harm or even death to other individuals on those highways, or perhaps a sound understanding of the current "state of the art" for a typical vehicle together with mechanical and physiological limits for those who control that machinery. Driving 100 mph on a twisty mountain road is suicide or vehicular manslaughter in most cases... sometimes both.

In terms of access to scientific information, the copyright clause of the U.S. constitution itself is rather clear. Copyright is explicitly set out "to promote the useful arts and sciences". Knowledge and information is something explicitly required if you accept the philosophy that an individual citizen is a joint-sovereign authority over the government together with the rest of their fellow citizens.

When it comes to tax supported research, it seems very reasonable that those "shareholders" who have helped to finance that research ought to be able to get copies of the results of that research, and not have to pay huge fees to be able to access that information.

If a private company were paying for some research and you were a major shareholder, it may be reasonable to expect that as a shareholder you should be entitled to see the results of that research which you have paid for. It would certainly be expected that if a majority of the shareholders (by stock percentage) demanded that research, the board of directors would have to see that published reports of that research were made available. In addition, very few companies, particularly for-profit companies, would give up copyright and IP rights to that research as a "gift" to the researchers, particularly if that company financed the whole research project from the very beginning. This is very common for government research grants.

So why would government-financed research be any different if you can get a large number of citizens who helped pay for that research demand to see what they are paying for... and at a reasonable cost? With reasonable meaning either free or so cheaply that it would be literally the cost of publication and no more. Instead many of these research journals are collecting research, claiming exclusive copyright, and locking up this knowledge to only the elite who have the most immediate need to access the information. The cost of access is so prohibitively high that ordinary people simply can't see the information at all, even if they may have some of the education necessary to understand it. Or even if the information may be valuable to them in some way.

Nothing except... copyright law?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from asking you to pay for something that's free, if you're a sucker.

In this case, the "something that's free" was released under a Creative Commons license with the "No Commercial Use" clause. OUP asking you to pay for it constitutes commercial use of the work on OUP's part, and is a violation of the license. Therefore, OUP making and distributing copies of the work is criminal copyright infringement.

IANAL but if he sues them he should be able to win easily in court.

Re:Nothing except... copyright law?

[nodrogluap]

Except OUP is not bound by the CC license. When you publish with them, you sign a license that allows them a lot of leeway in redistribution. You can see the actual agreement here.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to see you say that when you get hit by an 'incurable' disease. Hmm... who's trying to develop cures for those corner cases?

The money spent today trying to find a cure, through government grants, is money stolen that could be used by millions to make their lives better TODAY. A small fraction of people will eventually be "saved" by a government cure, but millions of lives will be harmed in small increments to try to make that discovery.

No thanks.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[MikeBabcock]

That's only true for the most part of "last-mile" science. 99% of space research so far has been publicly funded and probably would not have happened in the time frame in question had it not been. However, since most of the work is already done, it is now commercially viable to do research on end-user marketable product like space travel and space hotels.

Most companies don't have the budget to do the kinds of research that is funded by government, and if they did, they'd mostly spend it on immediate results. Look at the fall of PARC for a good example of how you're wrong.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[asadodetira]

You make the common mistake of confusing science and technology. I don't blame you, many people do.

Not "Free Market" Nonsense Again

[asphaltjesus]

let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?

That's already the case in the pharmaceuticals industry. Supposedly independent academic research has long ago been purchased by drug manufacturers in exchange for the Dean showing a great bottom line.

Has the cost of medicine in general gone down?

Is there more access to the medical system?

What about drugs that cure diseases in countries that can't afford to pay? Do they get the same amount of research as erectile disfunction and mood disorder research?

Please abandon this kind of thinking. A market-like system creates as many problems as the one it replaces. Only it's more virulent, harms consumers a multitude of ways and benefits a very, very select few. As Microsoft and AT&T have proven, even regulation doesn't shut down a monopoly.

Re:Not "Free Market" Nonsense Again

[sholden]

What about drugs that cure diseases in countries that can't afford to pay? Do they get the same amount of research as erectile disfunction and mood disorder research?

That's pretty much irrelevant. Do they get the less research than they would under some alternative system is what matters?

You could just ban all medical research tomorrow, and bingo those diseases now get the same amount of research as erectile disfunction and mood disorders. That's a good thing, right?

Re:Not "Free Market" Nonsense Again

[l4m3z0r]

Has the cost of medicine in general gone down?

The cost of medicine has gone up because we can treat more diseases now. The treatments are expensive because a huge amount of regulation and up front costs is piled behind the treatments. Look at AIDs 30 years ago it was a death sentence to be diagnosed with AIDs fast forward to today and we have drugs that will keep you alive long enough for you to die from unrelated causes. The aggregate cost of medicine is up now because there is new treatments.

Reguardless of whether its publicly funded or privately researched the cost of medicine should be going up, its proof that the system is generating improvements and is capable of curing new diseases.

Re:Not "Free Market" Nonsense Again

[asphaltjesus]

The cost of medicine has gone up because we can treat more diseases now.

Are these cures more widely available? Are they getting cheaper? What is the likelihood any given treatment that is less profitable than a current product is being researched?

The treatments are expensive because a huge amount of regulation and up front costs is piled behind the treatments.

I thought the justification used to sell privatization was lowered costs and greater access? Instead, you are suggesting they provide more expensive cures. Are you serious about the "harm" regulations provide in this instance?

Ground-based triangulation

[benhocking]

Historically, ground-based triangulation used local positioning systems and not global positioning systems. Studies have shown that countries that fund basic research out-perform countries that do not in both education and economics. If you want to argue based off ideologies, that's fine, but do realize that you're tilting at windmills and not being pragmatic.

He is paying not for his paper but for..

[JackMeyhoff]

.. the SERVICE :)

Cambridge produces the establishment

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, Prof. Rust, I hate to break this to you, but you are representing one of the two universities which pretty much singlehandedly produce the lawyers, politicians and civil servants of this country. All productive work that you do goes ultimately toward bolstering the establishment. And the establishment likes the kind of crap exploitative behaviour displayed by publishers.

If you don't like it - and I wish more scientists and mathematicians didn't - you would distance yourself from Oxbridge, and do what religious dissenters had to do prior to C20: set up their own Universities. Sound daft? Early C19 France's post-revolutionary applied bent brought work from Laplace, Legendre, Galois, Cauchy, et al. publishing in Liouville's Journal de Mathematiques - where the founder was also a prominent author; Germany supplied us with Gauss, Dirichlet, Jacobi, et al. publishing in Crelle's Journal, a lovechild of Crelle and Abel's relationship with the new abstract mathematics; where was Cambridge? Well, Woodhouse's attempts to advance on tutoring of Newton's fluxions by introducing Lagrange's algebra was a miserable failure, the most advanced mathematical textbook was a translation of Lacroix that preceded Cauchy's work at the Ecole in the 1820s, Frend was back to poking fun at the concept of negative numbers (400 years too late, buddy!) for the lack of physical association - and that was before he was thrown out for being OMG a unitarian. Despite De Morgan's "science of symbols" trying to drag Cambridge kicking and screaming to C19 Continental levels of progress (and, hell, the of abstract symbolism was well ranted about by Leibniz 100 years prior), he similarly received the boot for being an OMG heretic!

The sad thing is that in the first half of C19, England was the backward exception; today, the spirit of revolutionising society by broadening participation in scientific advancement is absent from pretty much the whole of Europe. But I repeat myself. If the best academics, following Laplace, would poke their "spirit of the infinitesimal" into the power-lustful eyes of the contemporary Napoleons, sacrificing a little research time to strengthen the power of the productive as opposed to the administrative, we'd see some progress. (N.B. yes, US readers, I know, putting control in the hands of the workers is socialism and in the hands of the owners of the presses is capitalism blah blah. Whatever. The cold war's over, enough of the witch trials already.)

And no, putting your faith in a profit-making entity like Google is not the answer, for the businessman giveth and the businessman taketh away; though I expect Google will court academics looking for a less oppressive way to manage the peer review and publishing process.

My apologies

[SlappyBastard]

You're just a right-wing nut. I should have known better.

Who was President in 1973? What party was he from?

BTW, the market did cause the healthcare crisis. There is an economic phenomenon called "cost disease" that occurs when a skill that can only turn out so much efficiency (such as surgery) fails to keep up with the broader market (which, at large, is in fact efficient and therefore surpasses its inefficient sections). It is no mistake that medicine became a problem around the time that efficiency took off.

Re:My apologies

[dada21]

You're just a right-wing nut. I should have known better.

No, I don't like the right-wing. Right and Left are both wings of the same side of the coin: authoritarians. I'm on the other side of the coin, anti-authoritarian.

Who was President in 1973? What party was he from?

Doesn't matter, both parties conspire to reduce freedom, increase taxation, and use both to support their friends and cronies.

BTW, the market did cause the healthcare crisis. There is an economic phenomenon called "cost disease" that occurs when a skill that can only turn out so much efficiency (such as surgery) fails to keep up with the broader market (which, at large, is in fact efficient and therefore surpasses its inefficient sections). It is no mistake that medicine became a problem around the time that efficiency took off.

If you look carefully at the health care system, you see the obvious causes for the crises: reduced supply of doctors, and a high cost to pay for services.

BOTH of these problems are caused by Congressional force.

1. Congress, the AMA, and the ADA artificially place a cap on new doctors licensed. This reduces the supply of doctors, which increases cost. Low supply + high demand = high price. In a market economy, people could become doctors, putting added competition in the market.

2. The high cost of services comes from two factors: a. the government's money flow into the industry (acquired through theft), and the laws legislating criminal response to what a market economy would provide for. For example, rather than having doctors hold liability insurance, the market economy would let each individual acquire their own liability insurance for each medical treatment based on what they need and what they can afford. This is currently ILLEGAL to get. This way, you would pay for the insurance you need, per treatment, based on the doctor's history with your insurer. Tort lawyers would hate this. This is called negative outcome insurance, and you are a criminal if you try to acquire it.

Re:My apologies

[SlappyBastard]

Fair enough. Don't expect very much of your view to ever prevail. But, I'm not going to pretend I don't get where you're coming from. The system is endlessly disappointing.

shortshighted greed in action

[Scrameustache]

let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need? Because there is no money to be made into curing diseases, only in providing lifelong treatments.

When in Rome...DMCA takedown time

[Xanthvar]

He should do what IP abusers do in a case like this... send a DMCA take down notice to the ISP, for the site.

I am guessing that the Oxford University Press's website is pretty large, and that the ISP may the university, so he may need to go up stream with the takedown request. They only have a matter of hours to take action once they have received the notice ( a certified letter drawn up by a lawyer, not an email from the author).

IANAL, but it would probably be a good way to get someone's attention, and can be referred to in a court of law, if he chooses to take action. Further more, one might be able to extrapolate, that he could DEMAND the server and financial logs, and then take legal action against all of those people.

This would be great, if he took this to court, and LOST, as it would set a precedent, which could then be used against the RIAA.

If only the world worked that way.

Here's to dreaming :)

Re:When in Rome...DMCA takedown time

[DrSkwid]

> DMCA take down notice to the ISP, for the site.

I know there's the "special relationship" but the US and the UK are different countries with different laws. We don't have a DMCA here.

Re:When in Rome...DMCA takedown time

[wes33]

Last I looked Oxford was not in the good 'ol US of A and so I have some doubts about the DMCA having a lot of clout ...

It's not copyright abuse...

[DimGeo]

... Remember kids, it's theft! Send the dang pirates to jail!

so the real issue is

[darth_linux]

does private ownership of intellectual property hinder scientific research? Should publicly funded science be required to release findings using creative commons (or other such) license? Does it bother us that a large chunk of DNA research IP is help by private parties?

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[ljw1004]

It's because in the "free market" of nation-states, the successful ones were those that invested in science. The ones which didn't invest were left behind. It's straightforward free market economics and survival of the fittest (nation).

They are selling the right to *use*, not access

[Geof]

Oxford isn't selling his work. It's selling access to his work.

Examine the screenshot more carefully. They are not selling access to the article (the PDF is available for free). They are selling the right to use it. For $48, they say, you can republish it in a coursepack for use by 100 students. In other words, they appear to be sublicensing the work for a fee.

The scientist claims this is a violation of Oxford University Press's license to publish his work. He may be mistaken if he provided it to them under a different license. Even so, OUP's action is still wrong. This is like posting a sign on a public water fountain, demanding 25 cents from anyone who takes a drink - it may not be illegal, but it sure isn't honest. Unfortunately that's par for the course with copyright: publishers regularly copy public domain materials, then claim copyright themselves.

Stick with the chemistry, doc! Understanding the law isn't for you

Here we have a law that affects everyone in their everyday lives. That law is so complex that thoughtful people who care about it, like this university professor and cocky Slashotters (like you, and I'm not exempt either) get confused about routine matters. We have an unjust law that's virtually impossible to respect.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[king-manic]

I know some "scientists" who have government grants for "research" that I likely pay a part of through my taxes. One of my best friends from High School is a PhD in an earth science, and he's always jumping from grant to grant to grant, and his research is mostly useless from a market perspective.

How about instead of "freeing up" research based on money that is stolen, we just stop the steal-and-pay mentality of government research grants, and let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?

If some poor researcher loses funding, and industry realizes they had something good to say or study, they'll get the money quick enough, plus they can decide who to offer it to and at what price. It is no different than the guy who washes cars: if government paid him to do it, he'd be charging $100 an hour and would forget to use water.

There is so much research that is not financially interesting in the near term that such "market driven" funding would result in the wholesale collapse of basic research. Your basically asking that all non-near term profitable research stop because industry does almost nothing and funds only things they expect to be profitable in the near term (10 years). Things such as the entire field of astronomy, most of biology, the majority of physics, the majority of almost all science is not profitable in the near term.

Contrary to what you think most scientists and grants do not pay $100/h to do menial tasks. They pay a Post grad student peanuts to do skilled work or a PHD to supervise work for just about what a guy with 8 years of schooling should be paid. I think your idea of government bloat is a bit skewed with the realities of academia.

Diagnosis: Valium deficiency

[DynaSoar]

Nucleic Acids Research is an open journal, which charges the authors a publication fee. It's supposed to be free for reading by their own statement. Thus, this is not some special case of open access submission to a regular journal. The charges window is from OA's regular, pay-for-access journals. It's obviously a simple mistake by OA's web site. Write email to AO's admin for access at openaccess@oxfordjournals.org and let them know, then give them adequate time to fix it. Journals, even open access, even web-based, are not fast action organizations and OA is, in my experience, one of the slower ones.

As for a claim of "my" article from one of a dozen or so authors (the complaint being about 6th or 8th among them) as well as the complaint about not being able to read it (you've got a copy, don't you?) instead of the more accurate "charge being applied to OUR open access article on THEIR open access journal web site", criminy, take a trank and some deep breaths. You're having a tantrum and it's making you spout extravagant and incorrect claims. It took me all of 5 minutes, including reading the blog posts, to find the contact point for OA's open access admin. Contact the right people and let them fix it.

FWIW, NIH has been working to get any publication supported by NIH funding to be made available for free (at least to US sites, as having been supported by US tax money) via National Library of Medicine's PubMed (nee MEDLINE), no matter what journal it's in. NASA has had good luck making their stuff available through their own channels since they won't sign over copyright to journals because they're publicly supported, and NIH is following their example through their own distribution system. And that's working with copyright snatching pay-for journals. Open access journals are already open, and I haven't had this problem with non-OA open pubs, so it's obvious this is simply a bug in the OA system. It happens. They're not evil ogres out to steal "your" pub.

It might go faster if the first author made the contact with OA, but I doubt it since I doubt they intended for this to happen.

Re:Diagnosis: Valium deficiency

[Creepy Crawler]

Oxford does seem to have that as a mistake.

Ingenta is NOT a mistake, by any means.

Take a look... only 36.97 USD for full text

Re:Diagnosis: Valium deficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify something, the PubMed database contains article citations and abstracts, while the PubMed Central database contains free full-text articles.

Interestingly, the journal that Dr. Rust published in is Nucleic Acids Research, which happens to be a PubMed Central participating journal. Thus, he could have easily obtained his article for free, at the NIH archive:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=1634735

Re:Diagnosis: Valium deficiency

[DynaSoar]

Yes, it's an OA mistake, or at least they're responsible for making sure Ingenta et al. do it right. They contract out distribution to Ingenta and others. OA specifies which should get charged how much for which things. Thus, OA is responsible for the mistake pictured. And thus the OA admin for open access is the proper contact because he/they are to see to it that the contracted distributors are doing it properly. Or, it may be OA's failure to notify Ingenta et al. that this is not a pay-for journal and article (Ingenta, after all, does not read what they distribute because they don't have enough people or time). If so, OA is still the correct contact to get it fixed.

Did you or did you not contact the OA admin for open access at the email address I gave, and if so, when, and what was the response?

I'll backtrack on one thing. Diazepam is very short acting. Since it's going to take a while to get this fixed, I recommend clonazepam.

libertarian nutjobs

[Anonymous Coward]

always talk like this, theres no place for gubment, all they need is their weapons and a compound to defend. why people continue to engage these simpletons expecting reasonable debate is one of life's many mysteries.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Sloppy]

One of the other dangers of state-funded research is that it gets politicized and distorted. Biotechnicians now have to deal with really weird and arbitrary rules about where their stem cells came from. And Yog-Sothoth help you, if you're in a government position and happen to notice a curious relationship between pollution and temperature: you better shut your mouth if you want to keep your job.

And yet, to restore integrity to publicly funded research, you have to tell the electorate, "Fuck you, I don't care what platform you voted for, we're going to spend your money on something you don't like. You say we're killing babies, I say a microscopic blob isn't a person. Don't agree with me? Well guess what, I hold the power and you will settle up with me on April 15." It's either a science disaster or a civics disaster: whoever wins, we lose.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[king-manic]

And you know this how?

Ground-based GPS has been around as long as triangulation has, it just wasn't a product that consumers wanted when it was available. It wasn't BECAUSE of government research that we have GPS, it was because the market demanded it as the discoveries were made.

I find it ridiculous that people think that just because government-research paid for SOME discoveries that those same discoveries wouldn't exist in a market economy. Not only would they exist, but we'd have even more research produced as people are challenged to be the first to market with a product.

Think about all the precursor technologies that are involved in GPS. Think about how much of it would be obvious to industry to fund. Transitors, space travel, plastics, computers etc.. all have government funded beginnings with industry nowhere close to funding similar projects because they were scientifically interesting but financially uninteresting research. Industry won't touch such stuff.

So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html

Dr. Knuth has a stark and telling financial analysis for his journal in particular and its trend in relation to the marketplace in his letter to the Editorial board of the Elsevier journal of which he was a member. It led to the resignation of the entire editorial board and the formation of the ACM journal Transactions on Algorithms. It's a must read for the current discussion.

BTW: I just started back at school for my master's and the required orientation seminars include a segment from the librarians. The librarians emphasize the importance of searching the more expensive, private journals they pay for (Springer, etc.) claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it. The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us. It was disgusting. For the scientific community to break out of this media trap, we must reject this mentality, allow researchers to answer questions on research sources on ethical grounds, and ultimately make the decisions that Dr. Knuth and the JoA board made.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[everphilski]

claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it.

Your journal submissions / Master's thesis will, regardless of whether you felt this was 'marketing material'. It is very important, if you are going to publish via any mainstream channel, and this includes masters thesis/doctoral dissertation, to consider the literature and cite, cite, cite. Failure to do so can lead to problems down the road, it is no joke.

The benefit of this is that you gain a better understanding of the state of the knowlege of the scientific community and you can better define and carve out for yourself a problem to tackle as a grad student. Uniqueness is important.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[megaditto]

claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it.

You are absolutely correct: if you are smart enough you don't need no stinking references. Or as my advisor used to point out, two weeks or research in the lab can save you two hours research in the library.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[VENONA]

I've just burned my mod points, and parent post should be closer to 5 than 2. Would someone please take care of this?

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[PDAllen]

Well, it rather depends what you're doing as to whether you need references. I'm a mathematician, so from that POV...

If your paper starts from the basics that everyone learns in undergrad lectures, builds up to a result and stops, then you probably don't really need to reference anything. Though chances are your paper will be much more readable and useful if you try to explain why your result is interesting, which means discussing other results a little, which means you reference them.

If you use someone else's results along the way without acknowledging the fact, then you are being exceptionally rude, even if it's clear from context that you're not claiming the result as your own. If it's not clear (e.g. if you include a proof) then it will look like you're plagiarising. Since you're early on in your, career, let me try to help. If you want to continue in academia, you will need to convince someone to give you a job. If you write a paper which doesn't acknowledge results it uses, then you had better hope that not many people read it, or you will never get a job.

If you use someone else's results and name them but don't give a reference, then you are being deliberately unhelpful to your readers. Some of them will want to check those results, you presumably know which papers those results were in (since you're using them) and it's not exactly hard to get journal issue and page numbers off citeseer when you know what you're looking for. When you don't, it can be a real pain. This won't kill any chance of a job, but it will make you unpopular.

If you really do not like journals, then you can publish in the ArXiV (or similar). You can stick stuff on your website. You can reference the ArXiV. You can reference other people's websites (though that's risky: websites change). A few people do do these things (and many people stick stuff in the ArXiV or on a website as well as submitting to a journal). That said, at least in the UK your department gets funding by getting a good score in the research assessment exercise. To get a good RAE score you need your staff to be publishing 'good papers'. And the way that is measured is that each member of staff submits his best papers since the last RAE, which are given a score according to the quality of the journals they were published in. No-one actually reads the papers to see if they really are good or not, they go by if it's in Combinatorica then it's good (generally true), if it's in Discrete Math then it's not so good (usually true, but of course DM won't reject a really good paper that would get into Combinatorica), if it's just in the ArXiV then it barely counts (although e.g. Perelman put his proof of Poincare's conjecture straight into the ArXiV without submitting it to any journal - it does happen).

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[Beetle B.]

"So do what Don Knuth did and leave them." ...And he started another journal which didn't do well...

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

I was not saying anything about not crediting authors whose works I use. I was stating that I would prefer not to utilize those needlessly expensive repositories of source material. Sure I'll miss some papers, and maybe some key insights, but I won't have contributed to perpetuating the problem of the exploding cost of journals. I'm pointing out the captivity of the market of knowledge and de facto monopoly by taking an admittedly naive stand. Stated another way: if this market were a free market, there wouldn't be about six comments telling me what a blithering idiot I am for bucking the system.

That cost is pushing up to the point where subscriptions (either online or paper) are so costly that they are inaccessible to individuals, and increasingly, companies. There is thus a tremendous pressure in my company on individuals with academic access to these services to use them for work. Doing so would be, needless to say, of dubious ethical virtue. So the net result is the exclusion of individuals and small companies. Moreover it can place individuals in untenable positions, caught between their employer and their academic license.

I don't mind journals per se, and acknowledge, as Knuth does that there is a certain cost of doing business, and that when companies run a journal they need to see a profit. What I find intolerable is the exploitation of the captive market. I also do not appreciate the apparent willingness of the market to remain captive (as expressed by yourself and others, and held to be a general truism: "No-one actually reads the papers to see if they really are good or not, they go by if it's in Combinatorica then it's good...")

I also have "free" access to a large variety of journals, but I am also aware of the indirect cost those multiple $1,000,000 per year institutional subscriptions impose on myself and the taxpayers (since the university receives federal and state funding).

Personally, I prefer to find sources by finding the groups doing the research and publishing the papers. I then am able to keep closer tabs on the state of research in a focused area more easily. The problem is that increasingly the more obnoxious practices of the publishers are becoming standard. The worst of these is a prohibition on researchers publishing their own work on their own sites. Consequently I have several sources for whom I can only access a small percentage of their work truly free.

I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with the situation if either:
1. the expensive journals allowed authors to publish on their websites. or
2. they lowered their prices to be more affordable to those without access through an academic account.

I will probably end up using (and citing, of course) papers from these journals, but I nonetheless felt that Don Knuth's decision and the analysis that led to it were cogent to the discussion at hand, particularly with respect to the changing (mostly for the worse) journal landscape.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[absoluteflatness]

claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it.

You are absolutely correct: if you are smart enough you don't need no stinking references. Or as my advisor used to point out, two weeks or research in the lab can save you two hours research in the library. Ah, this must be some new definition of the word 'save' that I was not previously aware of.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[towsonu2003]

claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it. That is true: if you use someone else's idea and you don't cite, it's called plagiarism. If caught, all your instructors will hear about what you did and never trust you again (and will try to get you out of their courses if you take one). You will risk your name being distributed within various listservs. You'll be academically stigmatized. It will also be noted on your transcript (usually with a small star) and your future employers will know that you steal other people's ideas. All these and more will hurt your academics. We don't like thieves who try to pass as scientists.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[PDAllen]

Two points. One, I said the UK funding body rates papers on the basis of which journal they're in. Professional mathematicians don't, generally: there are one or two journals around which don't actually peer-review properly, so you aren't likely to read them (anything there is very likely to be either very boring or wrong, and life is too short to spend time on that). Otherwise, you usually judge by the title and maybe abstract whether it's worth spending time having a look, then you read the introduction and maybe skim the rest. You don't generally spend too much time reading in detail until you need to. And of course you can find title and abstract for anything in a bunch of places.

Two, if you know what you're looking for, and it was written any time this millennium, you have a pretty good chance of finding it by searching the web. Most people do put their stuff up. For an example, take the Journal of Combinatorial Theory B (another top-level journal, published by Elsevier). It has the usual Elsevier notice about submissions being published elsewhere. But if you look at the titles, then you still find a lot are on websites, usually on authors' homepages.

There are two reasons to publish in a journal. One, funding bodies often use journals to rank academics (and departments funded by such bodies will have to do the same to some extent, because they need money). Two, more people will hear about your stuff if it's in a good journal. Not in fact a lot more, but some. Mostly people who want to know about your stuff will find out by checking your website (if they really like you), by listening to a conference talk (you probably give several in a year), by word of mouth or Google searches (if someone wants to work on the same topic as your paper they probably will find it), by skimming the arxiv submissions (if you put it there, a lot of people will check the recent titles about once a week, even if they don't open the articles most of the time) and failing that then after the standard publishing delay (12-30 months, depending) if it appears in a journal there's another chance to be seen by someone skimming the journal's latest issues. And you do want people to read your stuff (if it's good). Because when you apply for a job, you'll come with your best papers and talk about them. If the people in the department have never heard of you, you hope that there's someone in the department who's willing to spend a lot of time reading your papers and that person is interested in the area, or alternatively you produce a really brilliant presentation. Often everyone's busy interviewing six other candidates, teaching and doing their own research. If you show up and one of your interviewers has already read some of your papers, then you don't have to do a brilliant job of compressing three years of research into a twenty minute why-I-am-interesting presentation. A department will usually reject the unheard-of guy with a good presentation in favour of the guy with a decent presentation but where someone already in the department can stand up and say, I know this guy's work and it's good.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[soliptic]

That's the point!

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

As i tacitly acknowledged in another reply, my statement you object to is ambiguous. I am not trying to say anything about not crediting ideas. Read it the other way, which is to say that I would like it if it were acceptable to not even open and look into journals that are being milked for profit. The point there is to treat the journal world as a free market, wherein academicians dictate, through small individual decisions, or through large ones like Dr. Knuth and his board, which journals are "good" according to a mixture of cost and inertia.

Currently there is a large inelastic demand for these journals, some of whose costs have outpaced inflation by leaps and bounds. This is largely self-imposed on the part of academia: there is nothing saying researchers have to publish in certain journals, other than some monopoly-perpetuating funding reviews. What I am urging is that academics as a whole and through individual decisions take back control of the market.

Put another way: who is going to shell out $48 for ~5 pages of paper? At what point will your university come to your department and tell you the library cannot afford the subscriptions? Will you continue to subsidize the profiteering publishers at the expense of your department/college's ability to perform research or retain professors? At what point does demand become elastic again?

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

I'm sorry to have put words in your mouth, but nonetheless the generally accepted state of academia is such that it is stuck in a vicious cycle of:

1. As a grad student, I need to look good to my profs, so i must search through all available repositories, no matter their cost.
2. As a newly minted PhD, I need to gain reputation such that I can get a job, so this dictates which journals I try to publish in, no matter their cost-based inaccessibility to the public.
3. As a tenure aspirant, I need to maintain a bureaucratically assigned score of my impact in the field that is highly dependent on my publishing in costlier journals.
4. As a professor, I push students to search through all available repositories, no matter their cost, out of concern for their careers.

If we extrapolate this trend with public money funding universities, there is no end in sight. The publishers will claim some imaginary hardship or other to justify each year's super-inflationary price increase. the universities will claim that they are squeezed for cash. The departments will be inflexible, after all they and their students *must* have access to these journals at any cost. They're the best. The result is that the outrageous cost is passed on to the public at large with no real consideration given by academia that they might take their publishing business elsewhere and make a different publication "best."

I'm fortunate or persevering enough (take your pick or mix to suit) that obtaining a job is not something I am extremely nervous about. I have enough industry and government research experience and have done good enough work in those circles that I feel confident in my ability to get a job. I also find that excellence is a sufficient condition for obtaining employment. I also find that I would rather not work for a group that is so disinterested in their prospective coworkers that they cannot be bothered to read or pay attention to their work. And as to the 20 minute condensed history of work, I find that most research areas are sufficiently specialized that there is a large body of common knowledge and experience. If I cannot give a succinct overview of my contributions in relation to that, then I need to work on my communication skills. I am in a place where I can conceivably get by and make positive contributions to my research communities without resorting to supporting the vicious circle of soaring journal costs. This is perhaps the context that I omitted earlier.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[PDAllen]

With regards to the job interview - well, I am exaggerating a bit. But only a little bit: often when a department advertises a job they have a person in mind already: if you want to get in in his place when no-one knows you, you'll have to be pretty stunning at interview. But again, you don't really get known by publishing in journals, you get known by going to conferences and giving good talks and then by word of mouth.

The other thing you're missing is that the top ranked journals are not necessarily the most expensive ones. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. Annals of Mathematics is where you go if you've just proved a really big result; it's also one of the cheapest journals. You can publish in cheaper journals without hurting your career.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

I'm not missing the fact that not all the best journals are among the most costly. I was omitting it to concentrate on developing my argument. However, since you bring it up, how long do you believe this will remain the case? I'll warrant that the profit driven publishers are aware of the situation and have their eyes on selectively adding more reputable journals to their stable. Will their costs remain low?

Obviously there have been some reverse trends, but where is the journal world trending on balance? Some of the better organizations are picking up on the bad habits of the worse.

Most of the change for the better has been initiated by individuals and small groups of academicians against great inertia, examples being Don Knuth and ArXiV. As described in one of the other responses to my original post, Don Knuth's new ACM journal hasn't been the most successful. The commenter seemed to think this justified the current state of affairs. And you admitted that ArXiV is held in low regard generally.

I was attempting to furnish the original discussion with Knuth's economic analysis which is cogent to the overall discussion and as an aside express my dissatisfaction with my university's dedication to spending any sum these publishers will charge in my name. It's annoying.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

Does that make his economic analysis less valid?

And does that mean it wasn't worth trying?

Show some enlightened self interest.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[PDAllen]

With ArXiV...

It is not held in low regard. It is usually considered to be one of the most useful sites around: for example the two journal links I have in my favourites are to my library's journal search facility and to the ArXiV recent combinatorics submissions page. A lot of good stuff appears there, and it's not two years old by the time you see it (journals often take that long to publish submissions). I check it every few days.

But, the funding body in the UK, which does not have professional mathematicians on it, doesn't like it because it will _also_ accept the less good stuff. So unless you happen to have rich parents and don't want to be part of a maths department, you have to play the game and submit to a highly rated journal. Then maybe you send a copy to the ArXiV as well.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

"unless you happen to have rich parents..."

Another option, and the one I'm taking is to work after undergraduate and work whilst in graduate school. It just takes more effort. Of course it takes nowhere near as much effort as my one friend who took his BS and MS concurrently without omitting any cooperative education segments.

And I'd admitted I'll probably end up "playing the game", which incidentally has real world consequences for others, despite my misgivings. All along I've been expressing those misgivings in what I perceive to be the correct ethical context, which is to say one broad enough to capture the consequences for all participants, direct and indirect; willing and unwilling.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[PDAllen]

Fine while you're in grad school, but your career plan is not going to be to work at McDonalds during the day and write papers during the night. You want to stay in academia, you need to get a job at a department (or Microsoft, if you can get it). That said, it's easier in the US than the UK, and you have more sources of funding that care about what the quality of a paper actually is rather than just look where it's published.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

I'm currently working for a contract research company. Before that, I worked for Silicon Graphics. And I have industry and research experience before that. I intend to get through my graduate education and either stay where i'm at or go to a national lab. The last, though still acceptable, option to me is to play the professorial game. The reason I'd pursue it would be to teach, not to research. I've found a more satisfying work and emotional environment in application directed corporate and government research. And again, I find excellence to be a better tonic than game playing.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another option, and the one I'm taking is to ... work whilst in graduate school. It just takes more effort.

If you are actually capable of pulling that off, then my hat is off to you. I worked for a semester during my graduate degree, and quit the job because my research was lagging -- I never had time to focus on it. Now that I am on the other side of the table, I look warily at any graduate applicant who says s/he will keep a job during their degree, as I don't think I will be getting their best efforts.

And I'd admitted I'll probably end up "playing the game", which incidentally has real world consequences for others, despite my misgivings.

To me, it makes no sense to try to change the status quo by acting as if the situation you prefer were reality. As an individual you have very little influence, and by acting outside the system you have little opportunity to convince others. You would just be damaging your own career prospects for no gain.

Also, it's not obvious to me that an all-arXiv world would be a better place. For one thing, I think it would be harder for young researchers to get recognition. For a young researcher (or any researcher), it is relatively straightforward to publish in a top journal, which is required to give you a few (usually three) expert reviews, and which publishes your work if the reviewers are impressed; the journal is in effect saying, "Read this paper, as our experts agree that it is interesting and noteworthy". It is less obviously straightforward how to raise your work to prominence in a world where anyone can publish anything at any time. My fear would be that, rather than prestigious journals attracting attention, the attention would be focused on prestigious researchers, and those trying to break in would have a much harder time getting anyone to read their stuff.

The universities are the problem

[mgoren]

The type of peer-reviewed, open-access journals that people are suggesting already exist and are, from my understanding, quite good. See Public Library of Science, for example. The problem is that universities still see Science, etc. as the most respected place to publish. Which means that if someone wants to get hired by a university, he or she publishes in Science rather than PLoS. This is true despite the fact that the universities have been bitterly complaining about the ridiculous cost of licensing journals.

Re:The universities are the problem

[Alchemist253]

I would merely point out that choosing Science is an exceptionally bad example for the following reasons:

1) It is published by a non-profit organization (the American Association for the Advancement of Science).
2) Science IS one of the most respected places to publish. To get into Science a paper must be deemed to be of compelling and immediate interest to scientists across multiple disciplines. This is not the universities' perception, it is reality.
3) Science has extremely low personal and institutional subscription fees, far below those for more specialized weekly journals. (Remember, Science has 51 issues a year.)

I have never heard a science librarian (and I have talked to quite a few) complain about Science, Nature, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Physical Review Letters, Infection & Immunity, etc. The librarians believe that they are getting what they pay for with these journals. Those they DO complain about tend to be (contrasting with the points above):

1) Published by for-profit companies (okay, Nature is too, but there are exceptions to every rule).
2) Specific, obscure, and/or low quality: Tetrahedron Asymmetry, Biorheology, etc. (I am not going to lie: the publisher Elsevier is single-handedly price gouging the living daylights out of universities).
3) Have high institutional subscription fees (I have seen _monthly_ chemistry journals with institutional rates of almost $20,000/year) and/or are forcibly bundled with unwanted journals.

Cost of rules and regulations

[Technician]

" In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?"

Research is one thing. Rules and regulations you have to follow has taken the same road to being expensive. I needed to do some rewireing and wanted to comply with the National Electrical Code. In the past the book was under $20. Now it is expensive far beyond any publishing costs.

How would you feel if your town took published the standard your were required to follow to legally use the roads, but by the way, the standard drivers manual with the new revisions is now $150

http://www.constructionbook.com/electrical-codes/? CMP=KNC-Google
http://www.constructionbook.com/nec-code-2005/

Cost of materials for the job $160
Permit and inspection $192
Cost of the book $159.95 for the 6th edition.

This makes the latest Harry Potter hard bound edition look like a bargain compared to this spiral bound paperback. The price of the book is not in any way related to the publishing cost.

By the way, I passed inspection on first try. I saved paying an electrician $1500.00. I skipped buying the book. I Googled the discussion on the changes proposed to the standard to learn of the changes that I needed to comply.

It's important legally such as needing to know the legal distance you have to stay back from a responding fire truck. It would suck to have to pay $150 for a drivers manual. Why the heck is the NEC, a required standard selling for over $150?

Can anybody justify the reasoning for the overpricing of this book by a full order of magnitude? The price of the regulations should not be 1/3 of the cost of a large rewire job.

Re:Cost of rules and regulations

[Creepy Crawler]

Try Here.

When we're considered criminals anyways, why not act like them?

And who're the real criminals: Those who download "copyrighted works", or those who charge for what we have already paid for?

Re:Cost of rules and regulations

[Anonymous Coward]

I saved paying an electrician $1500.00. I skipped buying the book

and he didn't thats why he charges $1500 and in the grand scheme of things $150 is peanuts compared to your average rewiring a full house scenario, spread that 150 over a year and n jobs and it becomes insignificant especially compared to tools (even if you dont count a book as a tool)

now find out how much medical/lawyers books are, exam reading lists can go into the thousands of $ and you dont need a van full of tools

Re:Cost of rules and regulations

[Technician]

and he didn't thats why he charges $1500 and in the grand scheme of things $150 is peanuts compared to your average rewiring a full house scenario, spread that 150 over a year and n jobs and it becomes insignificant especially compared to tools (even if you dont count a book as a tool

Absolutely true. Now look in another vein and apply it to other part time hobby work.. Take Fishing for example. A commercial Salmon gill net operator may be able to justify the regulation book to comply with state fishing regulations. Why should the weekend angler have to pay the same rate for the same book? I don't know if you are a fisherman, but if a salmon or steelhead tag cost the same as now, but the fishing regulations were tied up and hidden in a $150 book, it would put a serious damper on fishing.

Pole and tackle $150, Check.
Resident Saltwater Fishing License http://fishhunt.dfw.wa.gov/wdfw/licenses_fees.html $20.26 check
Tags and Etc... Unknown. Need to buy the regulations book just to find the season & Limit information and tags required $150.00... %%^$%((&^^)*%^$

You are correct in stating as a business, the cost is a drop in the bucket, but for the weekend warrier wanting to spend Labor Day on the river, It is a serious chunk of change.

Re:Cost of rules and regulations

[Technician]

First the links in your sig are very funny. Well done.

Try Here.

Thanks. It's funny, I didn't make it there. I have kids and can't afford a RIAA attack so I am using filtered DNS. Following your link brought up a page somewhat like this..
http://test.scrubit.com/ It showed ThePirateBay as being scrubbed. Maybe later, I'll stuff this into my personal hosts file and try again later but that would be a moot point as the wireing job is long finished and apporved.

The link is safe for work.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Kadin2048]

While I agree with your general points, I think there is a valid role for the government in providing services that cannot (or that we don't want) be limited to only those who have paid for them. In economics terms, those goods for while the 'free-rider problem' is hard to solve.

I think GPS falls into this category. Putting the GPS constellation up was very expensive. Putting it up there, and also building in some capability that made the signal only useful to those who had paid a subscription fee, would have been harder still. (And with a subscription service, I doubt it ever would have become popular enough to pay for itself. I own three GPS units, but I doubt I'd own any if they required a subscription service.) So rather than having no GPS system at all, or a crippled one, you accept that it's something that's useful to society in general and pay for it out of taxes, and allow everyone to use it.

Obviously this is a dangerous game -- it's easy for corrupt politicians to expand the scope of government if not kept in check constantly -- but there are lots of situations where it's the most efficient and effective solution to a problem, to use public funding.

The current scientific journal system is beyond corrupt, and needs to die. However, privatizing all scientific research would be a disaster. First, although you would think that corporations (not having any pesky biological lifespan) would take the long view and invest in basic research, for the most part, they don't. The market favors next-quarter gains, not decades- or centuries-long strategy.

Second, it wouldn't be very healthy to have the majority of our scientific knowledge locked up by corporations who have no interest in it except insofar as it can be monetized or used to gain a competitive advantage. (Hard to put together unified theories when IBM knows half of what's known in a field, Microsoft knows the other half, and they don't speak to each other.) We suffer as a whole, if new discoveries aren't made public. The current academic system (where the currency is basically prestige, rather than cash) encourages dissemination of new discoveries. A more market-driven one would not.

The market economy is a great thing, but there are some areas in which the outcomes it produces may be non-optimal from the point of view of people actually living in the market. Solving the free-rider problem, either when it's not possible to charge for a good, or you don't want to charge for a good, is one of the legitimate functions of a democratic government.

Re:Taxes? the above is not a Troll - the editor is

[Ralph Spoilsport]

slashdot moderators gave this a TROLL mod? WTF? What he stated was PATENTLY OBVIOUS and DIRECTED TO the article Editor's original posting. THAT IS NOT TROLLING. The Editor's original statement re: Taxes was a Troll. The Moderator who took PhreakOfTime down as a troll was, in typical slashdot fashion, being a hypersentive dickhead, as many dickheads tend to be.

When the Editor made a blanket statement about "your tax dollars at work", the Editor WAS TROLLING. There are lots of examples of where the "taxpayer" paradigm collapses - example - people should be CITIZENS FIRST, not taxpayers.

If anything, this post deserves an Interesting modifier, because he points up some simple basic facts of how the US.gov works, and an equally interesting point about rights and privileges. I don't necessarily AGREE with him, but I know a Retard Moderator when I see it. And no, that is not a troll - that's simple invective bourne of disgust.

RS

Mistake of using the CC license

[OrangeTide]

Because there cannot be significant damages for violating the license of free material, your chance of actually extracting any sort of retribution is minimal.

What you should do from now on is dual license the material. CC for not-for-profit duplication, and explicitly state a royalty system for commercial use. Charge $1 for every copy sold. When a company violates your terms you can sue for real damages. And in most jurisdictions it works as multiplier so you can sue for far more than they have actually failed to pay.

Re:Mistake of using the CC license

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Yeah except they will just send you the dollar per copy. What good is that?

Re:Mistake of using the CC license

[OrangeTide]

Forward it to your favorite charity. Funny thing is anyone that paid for the copy will have the dual-licensed version at least. Suckers but at least not totally ripped off.

I suspect they would just ignore the license entirely and you would be able to sue them, I would be surprised if they actually sent you the money. More than likely they would just not distribute your paper at all.

science stepping backwards with epublishing?

[peter303]

I not longer affliated with a university. But it wasnt too much of a problem to visit a library and read journals on the shelves. But now about 1/3rd of journals are electronic only and universities arent as generous with their library computer accounts. It may be worht suscribing for a few work-related professional societies, but the dozens I'd read previously. Kind of like a return to the dark ages. Science progresses by open dissemination of results, but it seems to becoming more clannish.

foia?

[deadstatue]

could this catergory fall under the foia?research paid by taxes. people have the right to know

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Sloppy]

With that kind of attitude, we would still all be living in caves.

Only if we wanted to.

Dada21 only makes one error(*): he sees (or at least limits himself to writing about) the market. There's more to private action than profit motive.

We don't want to live in caves. If getting out of the cave is what drives you, then you're going to do it whether or not you can sell the idea of houses to other people. Or to put it another way: if you're willing to pay taxes for research, then why wouldn't you be just as willing to give out grants yourself (or if you can't take the time to be so hands-on, pay into a private foundation whose goals match your own)?

Don't underestimate peoples' sense of personal responsibility, or their curiosity, or their passion.

Why do some people pay into their church's collection plate, even without a gun to their heads? Do you really think they're still paying indulgences to keep out of Hell? And even if they are, perhaps they'd also think that funding science is the right thing to do, and will also keep 'em from roasting for eternity. ;-) [Folks, don't take that too literally; I'm aware of some of the weird shit going on, but I also think my point is less ironic than it first appears.]

Research into quantum physics would have seemed useless..

And yet people wanted to do it anyway.

However, 50 years later, without that research, there would have been no transistors.

I can think of lots of positive things that could be done through tyranny. Whatever your hearts' desire, give me enough power to be able to squeeze it out of unwilling workers or funders, and I'll give it to you.

But what's fair? If someone doesn't give a damn about transistors, how can I forcefully make them pay to research it? Don't you see that open me up to having to pay for their agenda? What do you think is the source of pork barrel politics and questionable earmarks?

(*) And it's not really even an error. Sometimes markets can be subtle, and people spend money on nebulous and intangible satisfaction. Look at how some people are (possibly foolishly) spending money. People are willing to spend money to feel good. Do you feel good about spending money on science?

You don't know what you're talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

"2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization),"

Peer reviewsed journals provide peer review, to filter out crap (like the stuff you right) from facts.

What he should've done

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

He should've copied his paper on to a P2P network or posted in somewhere in such a way that he got a DMCA takedown sent to him for his own work.

Then filed a counter notice.

He could then sue the publisher for copyright infringement and for a false DMCA takedown, which also provides nice proof for his case, and also sue his ISP for a failure to reverse a DMCA takedown if they failed to do so.

By the time he's done he'd get rich off his free paper. :)

Tax the stupid

[netpixie]

The first thing you do when you come across an online journal demanding cash is to check the author's home page. They very often have the paper for free download.

I'm guessing that pretty much everyone who wants to read this paper will have (at least) that level of nouse, so those jokers at the journal will not get any money. No harm no foul.

On the other hand, the slow *will* pay the cash and will get stung, but if we're going to try and stop this sort of thing there are much bigger, lower hanging fruit i.e. shampoo salesmen (pentapeptides, my arse).

Give me a break

[crgrace]

I have to pay (in theory) for my own articles all the time. Of course I never do. I save my own copies... duh. Even if I didn't I could always have a coworker email me a copy. Of course at work I have unlimited access to the papers, but if I were to quit I could be in that situation.

Makes sense to me, its my work but the "paper" was published by someone else. If any researcher emails me, I'd be happy to send them a paper if they don't want to pay.

This is a non-issue.

Re:Give me a break

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately "selfarchiving" is not the universal answer because a considerable chunk of the scientific papers is written by Ph.D. students who leave university quickly and do not care about self-archiving and can no longer be contacted directly.

I agree however, that contacting the author is always a good idea. Not only will you get the paper, but you can also occasionally enter into some discussion about your research topics.

This is exactly the point

[Slashdot Parent]

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end. The fact of the matter is there is significant overhead associated with publishing in an academic journal. The biggest cost is the peer review process (yes, that article you read was peer-reviewed before publication). So, yes, the research may have been funded by a grant, but the peer-review and publication were not.

Also realize that the publication cost is spread amongst fewer paying customers. You might think that that article you wrote on "Electron microscopy reveals transformation of mitochondria during apoptosis" is the most compelling thing ever written, but I can assure you that most people would rather read the latest Harry Potter book. This is why the price per article looks absurd. Of course, most readers of these articles are members of a subscribing institution, so they don't pay that cost, anyhow.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually I am in total agreement with your posts, but I think this situation is not as clear-cut as you suggest. I would agree that government has gotten way too far into applied research. However, government involvement in research really started in the early to mid 20th century with the idea that they could push forward "basic science" that was too long-term or risky (from an ROI perspective) for the market to handle. People like Vannevar Bush pushed this idea after the success of research projects during WWII.

Would you argue that there is no such thing as "basic science which the market will not pursue"? Or that there are better ways of pursuing such science (certainly I would be in favor of voluntary organizations collecting and distributing funds for such research, which gives a market solution that is loosely based on citizen altruism (and after all, what is the taking of taxes to fund such research, if not a forced altruism that theoretically the people have already approved?))?

Smack 'em Hard

[maz2331]

Lawyer-up and sue them for the copyright infringement. BTW... what's the "statutory damages" for such a violation? And... with a good enough (or evil enough) lawyer, you can push for "class action" status and smack them for everyone else they do this with... Just a thought...

Academics are like pop celebrities

[AHumbleOpinion]

The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us.

No, the librarian was passing along the sad truth, not corporate spin. The corporation did not create this situation, they merely leverage it to make a profit, as with any other trend. As noted, the academics have created and brought this upon themselves. Academics are sometimes like pop celebrities, they want to see their name in the *right* places, the fashionable high status places.

As you begin your study and research be prepared to take part in the big academic pissing contest. Your research will most likely be *directed* by advisors away from your pure interests and spun in a more marketable and fashionable direction. Welcome to the herd. :-)

Re:Academics are like pop celebrities

[Anonymous Coward]

In the ten years that I have been in the academic game (during which I have gone from MSEE noob to one of the evil advisors), I have realized that the publishing industry is not suffering at all. The volume of stuff that comes out year after year has increased radically, and so have the number of journals where it can be published.

However, there are still only 24 hours in a day, meaning that I have about the same amount of time to read as I did at the beginning. This means that my reading list does not, and cannot, extend beyond the top journals. The papers that go into the lower tier of the journals are only there to pad the CV of the author. They are very unlikely to be read or cited by anyone.

Getting a paper into a top journal is not a question of vanity. It means that your paper will get read, and if you're not interested in that, then why bother? If you don't care enough to be an advocate for your research, it's certain that nobody else will. The small fraction of people who are both brilliant enough to do earth-shattering work and lucky enough to be in a high-profile field, so that the recognition will follow them instead of the other way around, most likely excludes both you and me.

Re:Academics are like pop celebrities

[Anonymous Coward]

Pop celebrities? Pah! If you want to maintain a job in research, you need to prove yourself by publishing in acknowledged journals etc. Otherwise you never ascend to a tenured position. In some countries you are even hard pressed to go to a conference unless you have a paper published, meaning no networking (and no, the Internet does not always suffice).

Also to people demanding free access to researchers publications: many researchers are paid completely or in part by research grants from companies in the industry. One of the biggest contributors is in fact Microsoft. And no, they do not just pay to make a study making them look good. A lot of money does to research projects - often projects which may provide interesting business opportunities for Microsoft, but also things which only by "magic" prove itself useful (try googling SLAM and Microsoft for an example).

Re:Academics are like pop celebrities

[AHumbleOpinion]

Pop celebrities? Pah! If you want to maintain a job in research, you need to prove yourself by publishing in acknowledged journals etc. Otherwise you never ascend to a tenured position.

You are making my point for me, you are indicating that the messenger (journal) is more important than the content (article). It *is* very much like showing up on the red carpet with the babe-of-the-month to increase your chance of winning an award because a good performance (content) is not enough.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Sloppy]

Research requires patronage.

Fine, but why do the patrons need to have so little influence over (or even knowledge of) what they're patronizing? What's so wrong with me having the power to fund biotech over space exploration, if for whatever reason, I choose to?

I don't trust your research....

[Anonymous Coward]

..and yes, you'll be better off and so will society if you bus tables. This is from the SUMMARY .."isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?""

Is there something about "tax payer" you don't grok? The research has been paid for by the public, and yes, it should be available from some government run website for free then. And I would go further, if they get a patent on it, the patent should be freely licensable to US citizens. We pay for it, that means it is ours, fullstop. You do it all on your own private nickle, different story, do what you want with it then, charge whatever you think you can get, both the research and your product.

Re:I don't trust your research....

[The_Wilschon]

A significant amount of research is paid for by the universities, as well. The universities obtain that money from a number of sources, including philanthropic donation, tuition, and endowment interest. That money is not taxpayer money. Furthermore, in my field at least, a huge amount of research is done by people who are not US citizens and who are supported by grants from their own countries. So, when all is said and done, I would estimate that less than half of all research is paid for by your taxes. Should we release to you only the portion paid for by your taxes? That'd only be fair after all.

Anyway, you could look at it this way: taxes and grants pay for the research to be done. If you want the results to be available for free, then perhaps you should lobby for grants to be made for that purpose. That would be an appropriate thing to do. As it stands, the grants that are issued do not include any money which is marked for the purpose of making research available for free, so using the grant money for that purpose would violate the terms of the grant, and the grant would be withdrawn. Advocating the abolition of peer-reviewed journals is simply ludicrous, and a complete non-solution.

Assuming sources of funding

[DerekLyons]

isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?

Sure. Assuming the research in question actually was paid for by taxes... And not by a private (corporate or individual or foundation) grant, or by a private (University or corporate or individual or foundation) trust fund.
 
Which also brings up the question, under the terms of his employment contract or the funding document, whether Dr. Rust had the right to release the paper under a CC license in the first place.
 
Don't get me wrong, I believe strongly that research should be open and widely distributed - but the question is not as black-and-white as the Slashdot community would like to believe.

Taxes?

[NekoXP]

In what way does any tax money go to pay for this guy's research?

We didn't pay him to do the research, so saying "we paid our taxes so we demand to see it!" is irrelevant. What is relevant here is that he released it under Creative Commons.

What a Douchebag

[Slashdot Parent]

If you look at Oxford University Press's response to him, it seems this is nothing more sinister than a bug with OUP's website. They are working to fix it.

Seriously, what a jerk. This whole thing could have been solved with a 5 minute phone call to OUP's customer service line. Instead, he raises holy blogosphere hell (which, at the end of the day, is nothing more than a waste of time, of course). I hope he feels all self-important today.

I guess Hanlon's razor lives on: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

demand free access to the research we pay for

[smchris]

For shame. Every time a person gets free access to state university research an angel drops a tear upon Ronald Reagan's grave.

Re:Hold the Sensationalism

[VENONA]

I found parent -1, Flamebait. Personally, I find Slashdot editor performance uneven at best, at several levels. Those range from accepting submissions with stupid questions at the end, to a failure to avoid sensationalism. Nor have I ever heard of a Slashdot 'editor' performing a basic editorial function--working with an author. So I question the usage of the very *term* Slashdot editor.

In this respect, I'd call Slashdot Fox News for Nerds. Stuff That Can Deliver Eyeballs to Advertisers.

That's just my opinion, and you know what they say about opinions. But whoever modded this Flamebait certainly didn't read the moderator guidelines.

For what it's worth, I do find things on Slashdot that I likely wouldn't know of if Slashdot didn't exist. I value it as an information source. I just don't think the 'editors' are equal to their job titles.

Third Option?

[Slashdot Parent]

How come there is never a third option? The "Call customer service and see what's going on" option?

It turns out this whole thing was a bug in OUP's website. A 5 minute call to OUP would have elicited a fix and an apology, and no one's feathers would have had to have gotten ruffled.

Utter BS.

[mr_mischief]

The guy says they're charging him to use his own paper in a book or elsewhere. That's not right -- that's what they are charging the public. He can use it as he sees fit, because it's his paper.

That is, of course, unless he signed his rights away to someone lots of publication agreements state that the publisher has first rights for X number of years in a few media types. Did he release it and they picked it up, or did he submit it and try to attach a license to the submission? His blog entry doesn't really make that clear without more reading through more links.

The Public Library of Science

[Corson]

Scientific publishing has been a big business for some time. If scientists only wanted to publish their work then they would submit their papers to the Public Library of Science (PLOS) or to other free (of charge) publishing services. But they want fame, to advance their careers, and publishing in journals such as Cell, Science, or Nature is expensive; and access to scientific papers in those same journals is also expensive. But since scientists don't pay for those privileges out of their own pockets*, price doesn't seem to matter to them -- at least not as much as "fame".
____
*next time you donate to, say, a cancer research charity, remember that some of the money spent on "research" is actually spent on publishing articles in expensive journals

SImilar thing happened to me.

[dskoll]

I wrote this article for Linux Journal, and discovered it was for sale on the ACM Web Site.

I phoned the ACM and got it sorted out. As you see now on their site, it's freely-available. The ACM was reasonable and reacted quickly. That isn't always the case.

Cost of Distribution

[rossz]

Even though it seems the whole thing was a mixup and the problem is being resolved, I still want to comment on the amount charged to access the document. Had it been $48 for the single document, it would have been excessive. Had the $48 been to access all CC documents for an entire year, then I would say that was a reasonable fee to cover distribution costs.

Re:Cost of Distribution

[Teancum]

One of the problems with your line of thinking is the presumption of a mass market to help reduce the price through economies of scale. Aka for a mass-market publication like People magazine or even National Geographic (to use something not quite so tabloid in nature).

Many of these scientific journals have "communities" of readers that number in the low thousands or even just a couple hundred potential scientist who might read them. Think real carefully about that. How many scientists, for example, study deep water oceanography? Or semi-conductor material science? It isn't many for either field, and there are journals that cover subjects similar to these, in addition to the more general science publications.

If there is something more responsive to scales of economy (aka prices getting cheaper per unit with high volumes of production) than the print industry, I don't know what it is. Increasing a print publication by 10x only costs about twice the cost, in most casts. And the reverse is also true, like 10th the print run for only 1/2 the price, getting to absurd prices for a single copy print job. Some automation along this line is helping to reduce this "start-up" cost, but even xerography pushes some hard limits on small runs, at least if you want to maintain professional quality of the content.

And mind you, all I've talked about here is the physical printing costs. If you try to include content editors, reviewers, and support staff for these publications, these "fixed" costs can add up to a considerable amount as well. If spread over 1 million copies, it doesn't add up to much, but for only 1000 copies, it can be quite high. Even moving to an "electronic edition" for one of these journals still requires having this full staff... with perhaps even more "fixed costs" due to the requirement of having a technical support staff to keep the servers going, paying for bandwidth, equipment costs, and other related issues.

Basically, I'm suggesting that the $48 cost per copy wasn't necessarily the problem here... if this was the journal of original publication. That may even be a very legitimate cost of distribution if you take all of the costs involved and consider the number of people who may even try to read the paper in this kind of system.

The copyright violation was a big deal, and something which the journal should have been aware of before they accepted the paper for publication. And opportunistic resellers who haven't necessarily been involved with the editorial staff infrastructure are also dubious, but that is a separate issue.

There are some things that the scientific community can do to help reduce this fixed infrastructure cost, including the development of a wiki-like system of peer review with trust metrics and volunteers in the review process. Some of these things are already happening, but have not been accepted by many of the "old school" scientists who still think the internet is a new fangled invention. Traditional scientific journals have to adapt to the new technologies and publishing philosophies if they wish to survive the next century, and that is unfortunately something they are not prepared in most cases to cope with. The entire economic model that they have been operating under since before the time of Isaac Newton and the Royal Science Academy is going through a huge transformation, not just the physical equipment they have used to that point.

Re:Cost of Distribution

[rossz]

My comments were based on electronic access only. For hard copies, however, things get a lot more expensive for those highly specialized scientific studies.

Re:Cost of Distribution

[Teancum]

Electronic access still isn't "free" with peer reviewed journals. I get that you think $48 to download a bunch of bytes over the internet is too extravagant. The point I'm making is that for some people that isn't the case, and there can be an economic viewpoint to show that it would be worth it to buy some scientific papers... particularly if you are in that field and have a budget to help pay for those kinds of journals.

I do agree that other alternative publishing systems could be (and are) developed that take advantage of the strengths of the internet that could also be used to help reduce the costs of providing a service like this for much less than most of these journals are charging. But it will take a radical rethinking of the general business model that scientific journals have been using for centuries. Not everybody likes to change overnight to any new concept, even if it means that the information can be spread further and more cheaply.

Re:Cost of Distribution

[rossz]

No, I think $48/year is reasonable to access a central repository for scientific journals etc that are free. The service isn't the journals. The service is gathering them all in one place.

Re: Arguing about distributing data?!

[TaoPhoenix]

Really now.

The goal was to get research out to users, right?

Not counting the whole prestige factor, just set up a science torrent.

Because of the way science works, it's less susceptible to data corruption than music - the next scientist down has to ... duplicate the result.

The next room down the hall, the RIAA is moaning about the power of free distribtion.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Anonymous Coward]

Ground-based GPS, probably integrated with cell phones, on a subscription plan, with restrictions on accuracy and information based on subscription level, with frequent interruptions--this is what we would have if "The Market" developed GPS instead of the government driving research with military objectives.

The fact that we have FREE GPS service with no limitations (SA having been turned off) is a miracle, and would not have occurred had "The Market" been fully in control.

Re:And - Meandering OT

[KGIII]

Can't trust those Oxford folks since the OED hired an American. *grins* We Americans can't speak English and haven't any reason to be working on a dictionary. I'd almost typed, "There, that's been enough fighting to make this a trust /. thread" But, then again, that could be seen as trying to get the last word in. ;)

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[UserGoogol]

Because the whole fucking point of science is that it studies the pointless stuff too. If science was funded merely by the free market, science funding would be skewed towards researching practical stuff, which would leave abstract theoretical stuff that doesn't produce practical results for hundreds of years forced to beg for money, and that would force science to become hopelessly myopic. Science is not merely the servant of the economy, doing the grunt work of pure research so that people can go invent and create great things, science is an end in itself.

Furthermore, "stealing from people" to fund science is more justified than "stealing from people" to fund police. Providing a police service only benefits some people; criminals for instance are harmed by police, (or, for that matter, by people defending themselves independently) and that's not nice. Science, to contrast, benefits everyone, whether they directly partake of science or not.

Perhaps government funding allows science to be a bit less efficient by allowing them to get money even if they don't get results. BUT IF SO, THAT IS A GOOD THING. Science is by design inefficient. You look at some data, you create a hypothesis, and then you test it over and over again until you find out that it's false. Even the most obvious theories might end up being wrong, and thus they should be tested. This is insanely inefficient, but fuck efficiency. Science is the most important thing in the universe.

Also, the free market can only give us what we want, since it's based on voluntary transactions between people. It is fairly often the case that as science advances, we find out that something we didn't really think we wanted is, in fact, fucking awesome. In order for life to get better, we need the government to "steal people's money" and invest in crapshoots.

sadly the journal is probably right

[ILongForDarkness]

It is the part of most submission policies that the article hasn't been published elsewhere and they have exclusive rights to the article if accepted.

There are a lot of great free journal sites, for example "the archives" http://arxiv.org/. The problem lies in the fact that anyone can submit to them, making filtering out the junk almost as hard as if you googled the topic. What a peer reviewed journal does is force a standard on the articles quality.

Also, kind of sad, but most journals also charge you for the privilege to get published. Your grants are often determined by your research, and your research is assessed by your publications. Open source publications won't cut it, because the grant committee won't be bothered to consider much of your non-peer reviewed stuff.

I would

[MortenMW]

have been pissed off if something like that had happened to me. One thing is to steal a copy, but to then try to sell it to others...

Not just Cambridge

[Roger W Moore]

...one of the two universities which pretty much single handedly produce the lawyers, politicians and civil servants of this country

Really? So you think that degrees from Durham, St. Andrews, Birmingham etc. don't count? Just because quite a few high ranked politicians and lawyers come from there does not mean that most lawyers and politicians do. With an attitude like this may I suggest that it is your thinking which needs updating?

you would distance yourself from Oxbridge, and do what religious dissenters had to do prior to C20: set up their own Universities.

You do know that this is exactly how Cambridge was founded right?

Re:Not just Cambridge

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to reach the higher echelons of the civil service, fast track in the City or dream of entering the Cabinet and yeah, you're at a mammoth advantage if you've been to Oxford/Cambridge. Check current or historical lists of Prime Ministers or senior civil servants if you want. It's not just that an Oxbridge graduate is fairly likely to be smart, it's that there's a symbiotic relationship between the establishment and the colleges.

Cambridge went from iconoclast, yes, to establishment. This is standard procedure for any successful institution.. which is why a little revolution once in a while is a necessary part of quality control.

Re: Never attribute to Maliciousness...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked in several medical publishing and medical communications companies, even founded one.

I can guarantee that this wasn't done out of some malicious or nefarious plot. Plain and simple incompetence is the more likely explanation. The medical publishers are not, in fact, rolling in the dough... the industry is on the decline big time, and the publishers run on razor thin margins. Most are carried as loss leaders in a media company umbrella in order to drive business to the company's other advertising, multimedia, consulting, and medical communications divisions. The publishing companies have low level, inexperienced staff operating in a pen and sticky-note environment for the most part, even when web based. They have a large volume of submissions to review and publish with a small staff and peer reviewers.

And they chronically deal with authors who walk around with their dicks out, acting like rock stars because they submitted a scientific paper. They can be attention hounds, bloated egotists with a disproportionate sense of their importance in the grand scheme. 95.5% (with a p>0.05) of authors are amicable, knowledgeable, and human, but there is a core set of assholes who really wander around looking to make mountains out of molehills like this.

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree to pay for research through my taxes Tough luck buddy. In the real world, I don't exactly see the government expressly for asking your permission.

how about government publication

[pbhj]

Bear with me on this one and point out my errors!

The government use our taxes to sponsor research. The researches use the money to buy journals. The government then bases sponsorship on publication and citation in those same journals.

Why doesn't the government run a free and open access system of scientific [internet based] publication allowing research sponsorship money to be used for research and not for lining the coffers of rich publishing magnates? They could use the British Library as the patron. This could lead to all UK academics (and others if they want to allow global access) having immediate access to the works of all other UK academics.

I don't doubt that the publishing staff of journals can add value, incidentally. This added value could equally be created (I feel) by a scientific publishing arm of the Crown however.

Just wondering what I'm missing here.

Top journals not needed for wide readership

[AHumbleOpinion]

However, there are still only 24 hours in a day, meaning that I have about the same amount of time to read as I did at the beginning. This means that my reading list does not, and cannot, extend beyond the top journals. The papers that go into the lower tier of the journals are only there to pad the CV of the author. They are very unlikely to be read or cited by anyone.

I understand the problem, but you seem fixated on a single historic pre-internet solution. The "top journal" solution is no longer the only viable solution since communication is so easy today. Another solution that is completely viable is to use community reviews and recommendations. The truly great work will get the reviews it deserves, well known journals just speed things up a little, lesser known journals will take a little more time.

Re:Top journals not needed for wide readership

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably the way we're moving with things like arXiv, I agree. But we are not there now -- journal publication (especially top journal publication) is monumentally important to a scientist's career. Although the percentage is increasing, arXiv-only papers attract relatively few citations. Also, arXiv means very little to granting agencies, who control the money flow that permits future research.

Also, human nature being what it is, the internet changes things very little. We can think of a journal as a "recommended list", some with more prestige than others. So in the future "internet" world, how do we get enough people to read our papers to get them on the most lists, which will bring it to the attention of the most people? We have to advertise our research, to make it seem as sexy and interesting as possible, which is not so different from the world we live in now. In fact it's even worse, closer to your pop star analogy; scientists that are more popular than others would tend to attract the most initial readers. I actually think the model of the old style peer-reviewed journal is far more fair to younger scientists with fewer publications, as they only have to impress three anonymous reviewers for their paper to get wide exposure in the top journal, rather than trying to get the attention of thousands of their peers at once.

As for "your work will get noticed eventually", solutions to important problems have a way of being found by more than one person. You don't want to be in a position of sharing credit (or missing out on credit) for an idea because you were not sufficiently aggressive about publishing it.

Re:Top journals not needed for wide readership

[Anonymous Coward]

well-known journals and citations ARE community reviews and recommendations. To get published in a top journal, your work has to compete with others in a system of peer reviews. even though communication is "so easy" today, the fact is academics don't have time to read through lower level journals just to see if there's something worthwhile in them. Reading is still the same speed it has always been.

Taxes?

[Trogre]

I agree with you that access to these papers should be free, but don't assume that everyone wanting to read these papers had paid for the research with taxes. Many will be outside the country of origin. Others will use dodgy schemes to avoid paying taxes altogether. I'm really talking about the former.

Rational reason for paid journals

[drwho]

For some time, I was quite annoyed at being charged quite a bit to read scientific papers. But then, I had a thought that there might be a good reason for it: that there is a lot of work in checking that there is good scientific methodology behind the paper, i.e. it's an issue of value-addition through through selection. That would seem like a good reason to charge for journals. So I shut up for a while. But I am starting to get angry again, now that I find that much of the selection is not done reasonably, but is instead just a very disreputable part of the great machinery of the politics of science. No, I don't have any examples at hand.

So my conclusion is that if you find the selection that the journals you read is fair, then subscribe. Otherwise, do not, and do not submit to them either. The problem with this method is that you may never know what kind of back room sausage machine the editorial staff are running for very many years.

Re:Taxes? the above is not a Troll - the editor is

[PhreakOfTime]

No Worries. Ill keep on typing with my usual roller-coaster coherence of a discussion style. Sometimes its good, sometimes its not. Sometimes its modded correctly, sometimes its not. Sometimes all those conditions line up, sometimes they dont.

Im just suprised nobody started screaming at me because I typed "you're taxes" instead of "your taxes".

Peace

Controversy = Good Lawsuit

[rhinokitty]

Based on the amount of disagreement here I would guess that this would make a good lawsuit. Time is money, if this argument happened in a court with lawyers it would add up to about $2000 per comment (times 200 so far, do the math). I know that the Free Software Foundation has a legal team that enforces compliance with the GPL, which is good. Does Creative Commons offer any such service, or do they just leave it up to the artist, as they do with their licensing schema?

Without teeth and a good bit of enforcement, Creative Commons wont last in the long run, although I really would love to see it succeed.

"They better try this not"?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, Yoda.

What is stopping him

[Frozen Void]

He could start a blog describing his discovery/paper/theories. Publishing industry is a remnant of pre-internet information dissemination methods. I guess its conservative strain of thought in science which declared these methods untrustworthy.

For all those non-Americans out there...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Not being American, I have no idea what the problem with Open Access/PRISM is. It took me a while, but I finally managed to get to the heart of PRISM's complaint:

Recently, there have been legislative and regulatory efforts to compel not-for-profit and commercial journals to surrender to the Federal government a large number of published articles that scholarly journals have paid to peer review, publish, promote, archive and distribute. Mrs. Schroeder stressed that government interference in scientific publishing would force journals to give away their intellectual property and weaken the copyright protections that motivate journal publishers to make the enormous investments in content and infrastructure needed to ensure widespread access to journal articles. It would jeopardize the financial viability of the journals that conduct peer review, placing the entire scholarly communication process at risk.

So the problem is that the US government is undermining the copyrights of publishers in order to give scientific results to the public. That's essentially it, right?

I can understand that the publishers need to have the financial incentive to publish scientific papers, and that government giving public access to such documents would hurt the publishers. Is the government paying the publishers for these papers? If not, why not? Perhaps there needs to be a publicly funded scientific journal?

Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta

[invalid_user]

Don't underestimate peoples' sense of personal responsibility, or their curiosity, or their passion.

I hope I share your optimism, but today, science/engineering schools are having problem with student enrollment. Some had to downsize, some closed, and overall the "market sentiments" are not good.

And what about the few who had a "sense of personal responsibility" and studies science/engineering? They become trapped in a program that in the end gave them limited jobs in the university (since schools shrunk), and low paying jobs in the private sector, typically a fraction of what people in the financial sector earn (by driving up an economic bubbles).

I used to believe in the free market. Not anymore. You should wise up too.

Re: Never attribute to Maliciousness...

[cyclop]

and the publishers run on razor thin margins.

Razor thin margins? We're talking of a publishing industry that does not pay authors (in fact, most authors have to pay the journals to get published), does not pay peer reviewers and that prints only a handful of uberpriced copies (almost every academic journal AFAIK costs more than 15$ per copy today, and most sell individual PDF articles for as much as 50$) while doing most redistribution on cheap web servers, and have guaranteed subscriptions from universities in the order of thousands of dollars. If this is a publishing industry that has razor thin margins, I wonder how can newspapers be alive.

it's a dog eat dog world...

[conspirator57]

and whoever that guy steals from is wearing milkbone underwear.