That US education is in decline (entirely due to needlessly low funding) seems clearly true to me, from my vantage point at a state school in California. Nevertheless, US higher education is undoubtedly the best in the world. As my (Indian) professor once pointed out, even 2nd and 3rd tier US institutions have at least one professor among the best in their field.
Our primary and secondary education is probably more heavily criticized, but reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
It should scare you because Terms of Service violations are now Federal crimes. According to the government's reasoning, you could be prosecuted for using a fake name on Google+.
By the way, it's an absurd (and easily falsified) contention that there are no political prisoners or retributive law enforcement actions in Western countries.
I think in this scenario, institutional users of the private tracker would be required to seed for continued access. And you only need a few institutional seeders. When you torrent Ubuntu DVDs, for example, it's not fast because so many people are seeding but because Canonical is.
I don't know anyone, students and professors alike, who doesn't share this attitude about the big scientific publishers (at least in biology and computer science).
The problem in my opinion is that the previous generation just isn't willing to act on these convictions. Instead of going to good (high impact) OA journals like BMC, PLoS, etc., which costs money, they want to sign over their copyrights and get it over with, not realizing that this is itself a very high cost.
One of the concerns (read: lame excuses) given by the publisher side of this is fear that large scale downloads will cripple their web servers. Private torrent trackers for scientific work is the obvious solution. With university and institutional seeds, this solution would be efficient, equitable and fast.
I don't think it's exactly feasible to download millions of articles by hand. You can scrape, like Aaron Schwartz did, but that doesn't seem like a great idea these days.
I agree with the sentiment, but we're talking about vast databases held internally by these publishers, not available information encumbered with a little fine print.
Yes, however these rights do not apply to your preprints or revisions produced after publications, which is why so many of the the self-archived ("green" open-access) PDFs available on the web are the manuscripts rather than journal PDFs.
There are several reasons.
1) Prestige of specific journals
2) Former need for actual printing presses, etc.
3) Subscription-fee journals (i.e. with paywalls) do not charge submission fees (cost to publish is loss of copyright)
4) Open-access journals charge expensive submission fees ($1,350 for PLoS One)
Finally, institutions do not contract publishers to publish scientific content. Individual scientists submit their work to journals of their choosing, signing over copyright if necessary and paying any publication fees out of their particular funding sources.
You are ignorant of how scientific publishing works. The publishers are the free loaders. Scientists did the research, wrote the papers, edited and peer reviewed them on a volunteer basis and, indeed, typeset the final print versions.
The large scientific publishers are parasites who abuse their oligopoly powers to extract rents on the labor of the scientist.
It's definitely another point against subscription-fee journals (the "traditional" label is ambiguous; are open-access journals with standard review structures "traditional?").
That aside, I want to clarify: subscription-fee journals do not charge a submission fee, although they often charge for extra pages or color figures. The price then is signing over copyright on your work. In contrast, the open-access journals do charge a (quite large) submission fee. PLoS One for example charges $1,350. The OA journal then lets you keep copyright while licensing under Creative Commons or similar.
Google doesn't place ads on Scholar results. Publishers do not provide financial incentives to scientific authors. This isn't about any particular company acquiring free rights to scientific texts. This is about computer science and bioinformatics researchers in the text mining area acquiring rights to texts which they themselves (or the scientific community in general) have created in the past. Publishers do not create scientific texts.
An example of this type of text mining work is the detection of protein-protein interactions by looking for papers in which two proteins are mentioned together, perhaps near the words "binding" or "interacting." Of course, there are many more sophisticated strategies as well.
But your argument is that no one should be allowed to benefit from science if they plan on profiting from science, which is somewhat odd.
You can see the importance of WikiLeaks on "leaking culture" also in the reactive crackdown against whistleblowing being carried out in the United States and other countries. We passed a break point after which the power of the whistle can no longer be questioned.
It's a good thing then that the decision is predicated on the finding that CODIS scans for 13 non-coding segments of DNA that are not medically relevant.
Citation needed. At least the THO1 marker is associated with a disease [1, 2].
Slashdot Mirror
...he goes to Cornell and already works for Google.
He's a student at Cornell University and a Google intern.
That US education is in decline (entirely due to needlessly low funding) seems clearly true to me, from my vantage point at a state school in California. Nevertheless, US higher education is undoubtedly the best in the world. As my (Indian) professor once pointed out, even 2nd and 3rd tier US institutions have at least one professor among the best in their field.
Our primary and secondary education is probably more heavily criticized, but reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
And that's why "the law" ought to get educated about how computers actually work.
It should scare you because Terms of Service violations are now Federal crimes. According to the government's reasoning, you could be prosecuted for using a fake name on Google+.
Screen Scraping Is Not A Crime!
Screen Scraping Is Not A Crime!
India culture is not a western culture
Kid lives in Ithaca, NY.
By the way, it's an absurd (and easily falsified) contention that there are no political prisoners or retributive law enforcement actions in Western countries.
Poisson distributions are found over non-time intervals as well.
I think in this scenario, institutional users of the private tracker would be required to seed for continued access. And you only need a few institutional seeders. When you torrent Ubuntu DVDs, for example, it's not fast because so many people are seeding but because Canonical is.
I don't know anyone, students and professors alike, who doesn't share this attitude about the big scientific publishers (at least in biology and computer science).
The problem in my opinion is that the previous generation just isn't willing to act on these convictions. Instead of going to good (high impact) OA journals like BMC, PLoS, etc., which costs money, they want to sign over their copyrights and get it over with, not realizing that this is itself a very high cost.
One of the concerns (read: lame excuses) given by the publisher side of this is fear that large scale downloads will cripple their web servers. Private torrent trackers for scientific work is the obvious solution. With university and institutional seeds, this solution would be efficient, equitable and fast.
I don't think it's exactly feasible to download millions of articles by hand. You can scrape, like Aaron Schwartz did, but that doesn't seem like a great idea these days.
I agree with the sentiment, but we're talking about vast databases held internally by these publishers, not available information encumbered with a little fine print.
In order to have something "distributed" you have to sign a "license."
Yes, however these rights do not apply to your preprints or revisions produced after publications, which is why so many of the the self-archived ("green" open-access) PDFs available on the web are the manuscripts rather than journal PDFs.
There are several reasons.
1) Prestige of specific journals
2) Former need for actual printing presses, etc.
3) Subscription-fee journals (i.e. with paywalls) do not charge submission fees (cost to publish is loss of copyright)
4) Open-access journals charge expensive submission fees ($1,350 for PLoS One)
Finally, institutions do not contract publishers to publish scientific content. Individual scientists submit their work to journals of their choosing, signing over copyright if necessary and paying any publication fees out of their particular funding sources.
You are ignorant of how scientific publishing works. The publishers are the free loaders. Scientists did the research, wrote the papers, edited and peer reviewed them on a volunteer basis and, indeed, typeset the final print versions.
The large scientific publishers are parasites who abuse their oligopoly powers to extract rents on the labor of the scientist.
It's definitely another point against subscription-fee journals (the "traditional" label is ambiguous; are open-access journals with standard review structures "traditional?").
That aside, I want to clarify: subscription-fee journals do not charge a submission fee, although they often charge for extra pages or color figures. The price then is signing over copyright on your work. In contrast, the open-access journals do charge a (quite large) submission fee. PLoS One for example charges $1,350. The OA journal then lets you keep copyright while licensing under Creative Commons or similar.
Google doesn't place ads on Scholar results. Publishers do not provide financial incentives to scientific authors. This isn't about any particular company acquiring free rights to scientific texts. This is about computer science and bioinformatics researchers in the text mining area acquiring rights to texts which they themselves (or the scientific community in general) have created in the past. Publishers do not create scientific texts.
An example of this type of text mining work is the detection of protein-protein interactions by looking for papers in which two proteins are mentioned together, perhaps near the words "binding" or "interacting." Of course, there are many more sophisticated strategies as well.
But your argument is that no one should be allowed to benefit from science if they plan on profiting from science, which is somewhat odd.
That's definitely an important one.
You can see the importance of WikiLeaks on "leaking culture" also in the reactive crackdown against whistleblowing being carried out in the United States and other countries. We passed a break point after which the power of the whistle can no longer be questioned.
You may be right about the "foster alliances" bit, but Kissinger.
Not to mention that the THO1 marker used by CODIS is associated with schizophrenia.
It's a good thing then that the decision is predicated on the finding that CODIS scans for 13 non-coding segments of DNA that are not medically relevant.
Citation needed. At least the THO1 marker is associated with a disease [1, 2].
Why? Alito is a totally authoritarian political conservative, Scalia is a much less authoritarian political conservative.
The left / right political split is most common, but sometimes we see their authoritarian / liberal split as well.