Book on future of STM publishers
I would like to inform you about a new book [in German] published in mid-june about the future of the publishing trade facing mounting opposition by libraries and other pressure groups. The title of the book is Returning Science to the Scientists. Der Umbruch im STM-Fachinformationsmarkt durch Electronic Publishing (in German). http://makeashorterlink.com/?B2B542641 http://www.ep.uni-muenchen.de/themen.htm Michael Meier
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
Dear Stevan: I hear that Eprints has entered into an agreement with Ingenta and that future versions of Eprints software may not be free. Is it true? Is this an admission that the Open access movement is losing momentum and even the greatest of its champions is entering into an agreement with a commercial firm to ensure the survival of the movement? Please enlighten me. A few weeks ago I saw a news item which stated that several leaders of the Open access movement were inducted into the Advisory Board of Ingenta. The list included Odlyzko! Regards. Arun
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
I think that much of this debate comes from a confusion about the meaning of the term free. When we talk about Eprints software being free, the term free should take the meaning as implied by the GNU public license. In this particular meaning, one should think of it as freedom, rather then zero euro. More precisely, Richard Stallman, who is the main father figure of the free software movement, will tell you that free software is any software that has four freedoms attached. freedom 0: You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. freedom 1: You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. freedom 2: You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. freedom 3: You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Since Eprints is under the GNU public license, it is has a license attached to it that aims to protect these freedoms. Under the license, the producers of Eprints are free to charge per download, but they could not prevent another organization allowing zero-charge downloads. Free software is sometimes opposed to commercial software. That is a false opposition. Commercial software is written for a profit. Free software can also be written for a profit. For example mySQL a leading free relational database software. It is produced by a commercial company. I assume they make their money consulting others on how to costumize and use it, rather than on the software itself. I have no affiliation with the company so I am not entirely sure. I presume that Ingenta have similar things in mind. Plus, they will be running services to run archives on behalf of other organizations. The clients would choose to let Ingenta run Eprints for them, rather than doing it themselves. I have been a champion of free access since 1993, when I put the world's first free economics paper online, and I am the the founder of RePEc, a very large FOS initative for economics. I have had my fair share of arguments with Stevan in the past, but on this occasion :-), he is spot on right, there is nothing to worry about. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: What About the Author Self-Archiving of Books?
On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Thomas Krichel wrote: Not so simple. What do you mean? He does not give away, I do not read. Two simple choices by two individuals. It has no bearing on the general issues. Then why post it to this Forum, which is concerned with the general issues? The reason I stress this point is that I don't think it does the cause of open access any good at all to conflate it with the consumer's understandable preference not to pay for goods, even when their creator would prefer to be paid for them. Or the consumer's age-old prerogative not to purchase what he does not wish to pay for. That preference and that prerogative are as old as the hills, and have nothing to do with the radically new open-access possibilities opened up by the online medium, which pertain only to give-away goods: This includes all peer-reviewed articles (2 million a year, appearing in 20,000 journals), but it most definitely does not include all books. Presumably every creator who offers a product for sale knows that putting a price-tag on it will reduce usage: Most products are not concerned with maximizing usage but with maximizing sales revenue. The conflation of the objective of free access to give-away digital content with the notion that all digital content should be free is as unhelpful to the cause of open access as are the following: the conflation of creator give-away with consumer ripoffs (napster): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0673.html http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#24.Napster the conflation of gate-keeping (peer review) with toll-gating (subscription/license tolls) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1118.html the conflation of impact income (salaries, grants, prizes) with imprint income (toll-revenue) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.2 the conflation of concerns about fair use with concerns about maximizing research impact http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2006.html The most fundamental conflation of all, underlying all of this, is the conflation of the give-away and non-give-away literature http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2006.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1 Stevan Harnad
Re: What About the Author Self-Archiving of Books?
Stevan Harnad writes On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Thomas Krichel wrote: Not so simple. What do you mean? He does not give away, I do not read. Two simple choices by two individuals. It has no bearing on the general issues. Then why post it to this Forum, which is concerned with the general issues? Other lines in my message and the previous one pertained to general issues. That preference and that prerogative are as old as the hills, and have nothing to do with the radically new open-access possibilities opened up by the online medium, which pertain only to give-away goods: This includes all peer-reviewed articles (2 million a year, appearing in 20,000 journals), but it most definitely does not include all books. You are speaking as if there is an immutable split between give-away and non-giveway. That is not the case. Authors will have to choose between the two. It is important that authors be made aware on how much more their work will used if it is freely available. This is one aspect where the FOS has not done as well as it could. The conflation of the objective of free access to give-away digital content with the notion that all digital content should be free That is not what I have been advocating. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
