On 22/09/2011 18:38, Robert Greene wrote:
Wonderful! The whole point of science is to give the information to other people.
Scientists have done and do just this, all the time - primarily to fellow scientists. On top of their myriad internal channels they have arXiv (open access), CiteSeer, Nature (which for 51 print issues a year is really very cheap) and any number of other readily accessible outlets, so I think they are probably doing as well as they can, especially given that most of the time they are prevailed upon by their Universities to raise their publication rate simply for profile and fund-raising purposes, all of which rather cuts into precious research time.
Scientific information ought to be public domain. Anything else is a cheat of the intention of sciece. Only to the very limited extent that it costs money to distribute things should there be any charge. The AES ought to be ashamed of trying to line the organizations pockets by selling old reprints and reports.
The AES (along with the IEEE, about which similar complaints are voiced) stands somewhat apart, as it is not strictly speaking a scientific organisation but (as the name indicates) an engineering (industrial R&D) one - we might almost call the JAES a "trade journal". You have to qualify to be a full voting member of the AES. So they are unashamedly commercial/industrial in orientation, not least because the majority of its members are too. It is not a prime outlet for science research in the way Nature is, it is more of a club for working engineers. Companies employing them typically subscribe to the large AES CD and DVD and online libraries, so that having to download and pay for an individual paper hardly figures at all.
Anyone with a university login can search and download all IEEE papers freely via the "IEEEXplore" facility, even an unpaid external "visiting research fellow" such as myself. It would be nice if the AES provided a similar resource.
To the independent developer and researcher of course, where every dollar matters, yes it is all rather expensive, especially when you can't check a whole paper beforehand to make sure it is actually useful. On the other hand, anyone can ask to join an AES working group - no payment involved. I am a member of the AES31-related group (file format, project interchange), on which I had precisely no impact (they went ahead and ratified the horrible RF64 file format anyway), and I find that as such I can still access standards documents, such as on the newly announced AES50 HRMAI ("High resolution multi-channel audio interconnection"), which may be of interest to this list (a dizzying 24 channels each way at 24/96 over Cat-5 cable), so the picture is not all bad.
Richard Dobson _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
