Re: No Free Lunches: We Should Resist the Push to Rush Research Online

From: Tim Brody <tim_at_tim.brody.btinternet.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 12:15:56 +0100

A few points of interest:

1) Ewing seems to forget that the money that goes to pay subscriptions
charges _is_ government or college money. Therefore, how can
toll-access publishers cry foul when funding bodies decide it would
make more sense to have free-access rather than toll-access (and to
fund those publishers and organisations that provide free-access)?

2) Holding the literature hostage to add-on, "frill" services is
crazy. Let publishers, universities, societies, google etc. provide
"frills" and charge for them if they wish - the literature is the
important thing, and if it is freely accessible the add-on services
will be developed.

3) Ewing raises the frightening prospect of all the scientific
literature being "owned" by a few, powerful publishers.

The only way to avoid this is to put the author give-away literature
into the public domain (to be used by commercial and non-commercial
bodies equally).

(Equally, will PubMed, arXiv.org, RePeC etc. allow other, including
commercial, organisations complete access to their give-away
collections?)

Tim Brody
Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Received on Tue Oct 09 2001 - 12:34:32 BST