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New Bill Proposes Open Source Requirement for Publicly Funded Books
fsufitch writes "On September 30th, the 'Open College Textbook Act of 2009' was introduced to the Senate and referred to committee. The bill proposes that all educational materials published or produced using federal funds need to be published under open licenses. The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US. Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"
This is a laudable notion, but it has a huge loophole: how do we determine that the time an author spent working on a book was funded by the government? Consider a university scientist on an NSF grant. Such a scientist is typically paid salary off the grant for two months per year, with nine months paid in university salary, and one month not at all. The scientist files grant progress reports every year indicating what she did with the grant money, aside from surfing porn. If she doesn't want to open-source a book, she simply doesn't claim it as a grant-related activity, and instead publishes it for-profit and keeps the royalties.
I suspect that this will only result in academic books being open-sourced which were already published at a loss, for example by university presses. Anything likely to make a substantial profit will still be closed source.
Whoa -- not so fast. The government usually pays for fundamental research, and when it does the public should be able to freely use the fruits of the research. This means the right to read the research papers, see the data, and use any resulting inventions (i.e. practice resulting patents). However, getting from the fundamental research to the actual product usually requires more investment that is not government-funded -- and unless we make it possible for the people who put up the capital for this stage to profit they will not invest.
For a hypothetical, assume that NIH-funded doctors discover that a particular plant extract improves survival rates from heart disease. They should have to make their research article freely available to the public (probably after a year's delay allowing research journals to profit -- this is to fund the refereeing system). They should also have to make their data available to the public so we can check the results. Note however, that knowing that the extract is useful is not the same as having a life-saving drug. Someone has to come up with an industrial process to manufacture the drug, establish appropriate dosages and safety levels and so on. Every drug company (they are members of the public too!) should be able to now use this publicly available knowledge to try make a drug. If they succeed we should give them patent protection for a while so they can recover the investment in their part of the work. Other drug companies should be able to use the public knowledge too, as long as they invent new drugs.
First Hand Evidence: I had a textbook for a music theory class that was two years old. It was IDENTICAL to the current edition; they were switching two chapters in the front of the book every year as a means of planned obsolescence, so as long as you had an odd-year printed book during an odd year (or even/even) you were ok.
"sell it for $100+"
I see you haven't been in college in awhile. $100 is fucking cheap. Book now are at LEAST $175. Books that might actually be useful after college (some are great for reference) are $225 and up. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest here. That's literally what they cost.
Every new addition has slightly different problem sets and the chapters are rearranged quite a lot. If you've ever taken a look at a book in its 10th or high edition you'll notice that the professor's syllabus for the book is "chapters: 5,4,8,9,1,15" IN THAT ORDER. This is because the first few editions of the book were laid out logically and the updates had significant content. After a few revisions, there isn't much to change and therefore no reason to buy the book. They go ahead and rearrange chapters so that attempting to use an old book will result in lots of confusion when trying to find the homework chapters/reading/problems.
Profs. hate this just as much as the students do because they have to constantly rework their syllabus to fit the new chapters. This results in the profs wanting to use the same edition book for years and years. The book publishers figured out that this is impossible if they stop publishing their old editions. Thus, profs can't require the old book because there's nowhere to buy it.
Textbook publishers are swimming in so much cash that it's fucking absurd. It should actually be criminal. Seriously, criminal. I would support a law that required educational textbooks to be placed in the public domain after the original author stops publishing them (and of course define a minimum publishing quantity). There would be plenty of people that would publish and sell these "old" books just above cost.
This would solve everything actually. Textbook publishers would have to add content to their books for people to want to buy the newest editions... what a shocking concept.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the shitty "online content" that comes bundles with a lot of these books. It's either a CD that has some animations (software is windows only, of course) or, more recently, an "online access code" that gives you the ability to access a few animations/problems online. The CD isn't going to work in a few years because it won't support the new OS, the internet code is only good for a semester. In either case, it's just a scam to add another $20-40 to the overall price of the book.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Way back in high school, I didcovered that my senior calculus book was identical to my FATHER's from college. Sure 20 or so editions had passed, the graphs were colorized, and the typeface was made larger (along with the pages) somewhere in the decades that passed, but the material was identical, right down to the obligatory jokes in the index. I used his because it was lighter weight.
The book was fine and it's not like basic calculus has changed. I don't see why it needed a new edition every year (other than to make students buy new books rather than used).
That same year, I also discovered that the sub-freshman and senior English grammar books were identical other than chapter order and the color of the cover.
Ron Paul certainly has done nothing to show that he knows better than everyone else.
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr091003.htm
Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government's interference in the housing market, the government's policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing. - Ron Paul September 10, 2003
Because they've done the study.
The study that made them incapable of predicting the crash or understanding the causes? Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Because now you're just looking like an idiot.
Maybe so, but I'm an idiot whose wealth didn't get wiped out. It grieves me to see so many otherwise intelligent people following the expertise of the very people who have just screwed them over. Maybe they should become idiots. If I'm an idiot, at least I'm a lucky idiot.
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