Scientist Must Pay to Read His Own Paper 289
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?"
UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
And (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
This seems to be more of an issue of central services not being informed of which journals they should be subscribing to.
Re:And (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:And (Score:4, Interesting)
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....
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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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
So do what Don Knuth did and leave them. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html [colorado.edu]
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Academics are like pop celebrities (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 els
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And does Google cache count?
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
I would be surprised if they even read the license at all.
His license doesn't matter (Score:3, Informative)
here [oxfordjournals.org]
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 h
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"scholar.slashdot.org"
You could do a number of interesting things to entice the scholarly community to use the service.
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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 t
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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 disco
Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC (Score:2)
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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. 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.
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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 [oxfordjournals.org]" (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 probab
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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...
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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
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Or, you can use an existing, free, Cornell/NSF-supported e-print repository, arXiv.org [arxiv.org].
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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
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(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 [aps.org] (lots of pay-per-view / access restrictions) is a better place to publish than JCAP [sissa.it]. I am small-fry, s
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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 le
The document is free to read (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Please get your facts right. As a Cambridge alumnus myself, I have some pride in my alma mater.
13th century, not 7th.
No surprise. (Score:2)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Now, either he's mistaken, and there is nothing
Can't he sue them (Score:3, Interesting)
WIthout permission? (Score:2)
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 publi
Next time, send them a copy. (Score:2)
Story Overblown (Score:2, Informative)
Publish in PLOS (Score:2, Informative)
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 t
Full Text, only $48 dollars or 5 mod points (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [imageshack.us]
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...
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: (Score:2)
Here's the Oxford website in question: Here [oxfordjournals.org]
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 [ingentaconnect.com] in the line of $36.97 to view this. Hmm.
The Document Is Free, What Is He On About? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [copyright.com] 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: (Score:2)
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!
who owns research (Score:2)
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 copyrigh
Nominative determinism strikes again (Score:2)
Though in this case it's the family name.
Price quoted is for commerial use only! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [doi.org]
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: (Score:2, Informative)
Taxes? (Score:2, Troll)
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 y
Re:Taxes? the above is not a Troll - the editor is (Score:2)
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 "taxpaye
Cambridge produces the establishment (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
It's not copyright abuse... (Score:2)
so the real issue is (Score:2, Insightful)
Diagnosis: Valium deficiency (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Ingenta is NOT a mistake, by any means.
Take a look... only 36.97 USD for full text [ingentaconnect.com]
Cost of rules and regulations (Score:4, Insightful)
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/
http://www.constructionbook.com/nec-code-2005/ [constructionbook.com]
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Mistake of using the CC license (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
SImilar thing happened to me. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Typical Cambridge whinger (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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. Jus
They are selling the right to *use*, not access (Score:2)
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
Re:Two Ideas (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, I have... And they didn't have much trouble finding stuff in it.
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Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:2)
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 extr
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:2)
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 c
Re: (Score:2)
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.
My apologies (Score:2)
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
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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
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:2)
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 "m
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Not "Free Market" Nonsense Again (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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?
shortshighted greed in action (Score:2)
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:2)
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 do
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:I don't agree to pay for research through my ta (Score:3, Insightful)
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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 ma
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You couldn't be more wrong unless you are somehow counting research performed by the US military as some kind of market force...
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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 resul
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Ground-based triangulation (Score:2)
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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 prod
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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 ha
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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.
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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.
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