I'm just back from a weekend conference and a few days in the San Jose / Palo Alto area, which I had intended to spend doing research in the Stanford libraries. Stanford used to have the best physics/technical library on the West Coast.
Perhaps they still do, if you are a student or professor, have access to their electronic books, and can do proper research with one screen at a time. But their hard science book library is now only 8 rows of 24 feet of shelving, with 95% of their collection in offsite storage. Stanford has "less on the floor" than Portland State University (or San Jose State, now the south bay leader). Journal articles are institutional subscription, or $35 per article for outsiders. Portland State is the same deal, except many of the same journals are still on PSU shelves. In the quest for "convenience", universities are surrendering their freedom to the four big academic monopolies. When paper versions disappear, you can bet that the monopolies will raise prices until the universities have to choose between academic staff and online access. With the DMCA protecting publishers, who's to stop them? For now, Oregon Health Sciences University, Washington State, and the University of Washington still permit visitors access to their online collections, but this is expensive and could disappear. Worse, common-mode information system vulnerabilities at the big four could wipe out much of the academic corpus. If the lights are blinking on a backup drive during a restore, is that actually a restore, or an erasure? Yes, electronic journals are convenient. But copies should be widely distibuted: purchase the content once, watermarked perhaps, and keep a copy on your local institutional hardware, forever. If the publishes insist on monopoly custody, or even monoculture software and hardware, then they should operate their monopolies subject to capital punishment (!) for executives and stockholders if they irretrievably lose civilization's crown jewels. Those will be a fraction of the lives that will be lost if this vital information disappears. Aaron Schwartz died for our sins. We're next. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
