Slashdot Mirror
Nature Makes All Articles Free To View
An anonymous reader writes: Scientific journal publishers have been under pressure recently by both scientists and the public to relax their restrictive rules on the sharing of information. Now, Macmillan has announced that its Nature Publishing Group will make all research papers free to read. This will require the use of proprietary viewing software, but it's a step in the right direction. "Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. "To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access," says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. 'With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway,' he says. But Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the program is a step forward in that it eliminates the six-month embargo that NPG demands for free archiving of manuscripts."
You need a proprietary reader (just Windows and OS X). You need an institutional license if you want to access the older reports, and you need a subscription to access those going back just a few years.
So is the DRM broken yet?
No? I'll check back in 10 minutes...
Liberty in your lifetime
"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."
I'd be willing to pay money to not have to use that piece of crap.
How can folks be so arrogant to assume that a professional hasn't got her workflows up and running? We are't thrilled to get *your* workflow and *the other publisher's workflow* all of them pushed down our throats.
And we, the researchers, libraries and students are collateral damage of the turf wars of the platforms. Thanks, but no thanks. Go play bingo or blackjack in some casino, but leave us the fuck alone.
I'll take paper over this mess any day.
Often if you Google "ARTICLE TITLE" + PDF you will find a paywalled research somewhere. Researchers want their papers read and will often host them on their websites.
soylentnews.org
I think it is a great news and they are setting a precedent.
With luck the software they chose for this will place a high enough load on their webservers that they will eventually collapse under the load. Once that happens they will need to seek out a way to distribute the papers that doesn't reduce their servers to smouldering rubble; there is a good chance that situation will force them to just start letting everyone view the papers as regular PDF without additional software.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Don't you worry. Once Macmillan is finished assembling a crack team of enterprise licensing experts from IBM and Oracle they'll be able to offer a special 'programmatic access' subscription tier with an API developed by someone who should have stuck with printed paper and a pricing structure as inscrutable as it is usurious!
Really! I'm serious! I'm staying away from anyone with links to someone I'm mad at! And furthermore, I'm holding my breath, starting now, until they acquiesce. I'm serious! I'm not bluffing! One, Two, Three... I'm not kidding, Nature!!
Nope. It's called Digital Rights Management.
In any given digital channel, if a publisher has a choice between releasing their licensed material with protection, or not releasing it, they will choose to (or, sometimes, have to) not release it. Without DRM there would be fewer distribution channels. No Netflix, no Hulu, no BBC iPlayer, etc. In the vast majority of cases they have to use DRM to honour licenses they have with the content they are offering. Sometimes licenses can be renegotiated, and we end up with things like iTunes etc. which can deliver DRM-free media, only because the legal hurdles have been removed. Without DRM we'd not have iTunes, as its weight caused a massive shift in how people think about draconian content protection.
DRM has a place, and serves a purpose. It sometimes gets in the way, but if that is indeed unjust, it doesn't get in the way for long.
The thing with academic articles is the people and who write the articles and the organisations they work for DON'T get any compensation from the journals. In many cases the reviewers don't either. This applies regardless of whether the paper is worthless drek or a major breakthrough.
People are getting pissed off with a model where research paid for primerally by taxpayers and performed by universities is locked up by journals for their own profit.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
> (and be careful of your speling).
Ha!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
No, it's "Restrictions". I don't need obstacles that prevent me from consuming my legitimately-purchased media in the ways they were intended. These things don't manage my rights, they manage my restrictions.
My rights are that I get to play the game, listen to the music or use the program however the hell I want to. Whenever I want to, whether I'm online or not, and I get to do so without any corporate oversight.
That depends entirely on whether you allow their PR department to define the acronym, or prefer the more accurate community-based definition.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It ain't just about you, Peachy. It's about the other guy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Publishers wish they had that choice. No, the choice is, will they release it, or will they be left behind when someone else releases it, legally or not? The law can't stop piracy. DRM is just fake security, it can't stop piracy either. Nothing can stop piracy.
Nor should we want piracy stopped. Sharing of knowledge is crucial to our advancement. It is these rent seeking parasites who are the real criminals. Their anti-social hostage taking of knowledge that they did not help create could result in us not discovering something crucial in time to act on it. I'm not talking about mere cures for diseases, I'm talking about knowledge that could save civilization. What if, unknown to us, a big asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, and we would have learned of it in time if some damned publisher hadn't locked the knowledge away? And that's only one of the most obvious dangers. More subtle dangers abound, anything from climate change to large scale chemical imbalances, atmospheric and magnetic changes that let radiation through.
Bad enough that we have propagandists of the school of Big Tobacco alive and doing well, we should not make life even easier for them. Copyright is too often misused for censorship, with DMCA takedown notices one of their favorite methods.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
That would imply that the system only manages the things they have a right to - to wit, copying. That is clearly not the case. They have no right to restrict which devices/programs I use to consume my content. They have no right to restrict my ability to transfer a legitimate purchase to a friend. They have no right to record the books in my library, nor even the fact that I own the book in question. Those are all extra-legal privileges that publishers have acquired due to technological restrictions and the DMCA that makes it illegal to bypass them.
By my count the extra-legal restrictions and privileges far outnumber the one right. So tell me again why the R should be interpreted as "Rights"?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
, fuck you nature.
Careful there boy, capitalization is important. You get the entire ecosystem after you, you're in trouble.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You made me feel like we're in the desert and I just went off on a slightly drunken rant. Did you see that oasis over there?
Humanity has long passed moved beyond survival of the individual. Survival of the species is the only thing that has value today.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You have a funny definition of value. Those articles by college professors who want to be published for glory and tenure lay the foundation for virtually all the technological advances of our civilization. But I'm supposed to believe they're less valuable than a some story/painting/recording that nobody will remember a century from now?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Perhaps more fundamentally, you cannot 'manage rights' without managing restrictions (since if a user lacks a right, they are to be restricted from doing it) and you cannot 'manage restrictions' without managing rights(since, if a restriction is not imposed, the user possesses a right).
It sounds nicer to talk about 'rights management' rather than 'restriction enforcement'; but the moment you make permission something that is technically enforced, 'rights' and 'restrictions' are inextricably linked.
And you're probably not alone. I tend to read papers on whatever the default PDF reader for the platform I'm on is, but a lot of my colleagues have preferred tools that track the PDF and citation metadata for papers and index their annotations in searchable form. They sync the data between computer and tablet. If you have a custom proprietary format, then it won't integrate with any of this, so your article won't be found (if it's read at all) by people who search their local repositories of papers that they've read to try to find the thing that they remember reading six months ago.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nature Makes All Particles Free To View
Trippy.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A lot of academics read papers on tablets now.
Is this a ploy to get people to buy Surface Pro tablets, which run Windows?
If your platform doesn't support all of [Android, Kindle, and iOS] (including integrating with the apps that people use for bibliography management and annotation on these devices) then it's dead in the water.
Say a platform says "Android and Kindle Fire: Download reader from Google Play or Amazon Appstore now! iOS: Coming soon." If this is is unacceptable, then how does it benefit anyone to keep the Android reader unavailable to the public pending approval of the iOS reader by Apple?
Sure, a DRM platform owner could document the interface. But it would require a player key, which your reader won't get unless it's non-free (to meet robustness requirements).
What problems did you encounter when trying ReadCube for Windows in Wine? Its AppDB currently does not list ReadCube. Or is it like PunkBuster and GFWL, which intentionally require bit-perfect copies of Windows system files to be present on the disk?
There is no neutral backronym for DRM -- just like "movie pirates" or "movie freeeloaders" both terms show your position towards the topic. Best is to use DRM.
If only researchers didn't get compensated.
They don't, in fact they have to give Nature money and copyright to get their article published and that's after reviewers have said "this changes everything". What every researcher wants is to be published in Nature or Science, such a paper is more valuable to their career than their Phd. These journals are #1 and #2 in academic rankings because they have built up that reputation over a century or more. Yeah, their business model needs to open up but you can't blame them for being cautious, nobody wants to see either institution go belly up (other than the anti-science mob).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The question is, will Nature be "free" going forward? If not, what limitations will be put on it.
Reading the article, it seems that the way this is going to work is that non-subscribers cannot access nature articles (which is disappointing), but anyone who does have access to the articles can share them with anyone who does not have access.
It is still a much better solution than the current one, which requires you to either pay or to login to your institution and search.
At least it is a step in the right direction.
You do realize that there are publishers that deliberately release stuff without DRM. There are Nook eBooks that come with statements that the author or publisher has requested no DRM, but please respect copyright anyway. Baen at least used to offer a lot of books for free with no DRM (haven't checked lately).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes