To All:
I just want to make sure that this excellent link does not get buried in the
discussion. Mendeley offers some really cool services to share your papers. It's
not as good as the peer-to-peer exchange, but supposedly safer in terms of
copyright.
Please take a look at
http://www.mendeley.com/
Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research
papers. It is pretty cool to keep track of all the papers that you have
downloaded to your hard disk and works like iTunes for music.
Mendeley Web lets you manage your papers online, discover research trends and
connect to like-minded researchers. The more of us join, the larger the WWW
library that we will get access to. Please consider joining.
The article that was sent earlier is at
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/mendeleys-klingon-battle-cruiser-de-cloaks-in-london-with-the-lastfm-for-academia/
and gives some background about the company.
If we could all subscribe and upload our publications to Mendeley we would
already solve a lot of problems with access to our publications.
To Gavin and likeminded:
Thanks for the warnings, your points are well taken. Each and everyone has their
own level of risk tolerance and sets of justifications for what we choose to do.
Here are mine:
- It has been shown in numerous research that existing patent and copyright law
is stifling progress. Those who were initially supposed to be benefiting from
these laws are in fact among the losers. Most of the profits are reaped by those
who have nothing to do with research.
- Since we don't have the lobbying power and skills to change the existing laws
(at least for now), some level of civil disobedience (thanks Bill, I really
liked that) should be only expected.
- Unlike musicians, we are not even paid by the publishers to do our research.
In fact we volunteer to edit and review papers for them to benefit. I think it's
very unlikely that the publishers will go after scientists, since they are smart
enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for them. They are in
fact the pirates, which was very elegantly described in the article that I've
already sent earlier.
(http://eaves.ca/2009/04/28/education-where-copyrighters-and-publishers-are-the-pirates/)
- Most of our work is funded by tax money and should be in public domain by
definition. If the taxpayers paid for the work, then they own the results.
Publications are the results.
To Jim and others who are easily pissed:
Don't put your work on the web. If you post it on the web in open access - then
it is open access. You can't at the same time use the web to show off and expect
that nobody will want to use your photos (especially if they are good). If you
wish to restrict the use of your photos - then make it clear and restrict access.
We all work hard but some of us actually feel good when others find our work
good enough to use and our ideas smart enough to further disseminate for the
common good.
Cheers,
Alexey
--
Alexey Voinov
_____________________________________________________________________
!!!**** please note new e-mail address: [email protected] ****!!!
_____________________________________________________________________
Chesapeake Research Consortium Community Modeling Program &
Johns Hopkins University Dept. of Geography and Environm. Engineering
645 Contees Wharf Road, P.O. Box 28, Edgewater, MD 21037
TEL: 410 798-1283; 703 880-1178 WWW: http://www.likbez.com/AV
