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.
I wasn't going to come back into this but, Robert, I do think you are being a little hard on the AES
here - as a member, it's only about 107 euros (price of a dozen bottles of reasonably good wine or
one hundred Mars bars) for a year's access and the number of items you can download is unlimited.
Don't forget, it's not just the distribution costs you have to factor in but the cost of maintaining
the archive and, more particularly, of producing it in the first place. It's not just a case of
pushing the "save as as .pdf" button as we would do these days, because the vast majority of the
archive had to be scanned in from paper sources, many of which would have to be unbound then rebound
(all the early journals and most of the early conference/convention proceedings, for instance). I
think the AES should be commended for doing it, not condemned.
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.
Richard - the cost to the University is an order of magnitude greater for IEEEXplore access than it
is for them to subscribe to the AES equivalent. This is, of course, partly because the IEEE library
is very, very much larger. IEEEXplore is not cost-free except in as far as Universities decide to
make it so to users. It _is_ a fantastic resource, as is the AES library. We've been trying here to
persuade the Uni here to subscribe to the AES library for years, but with no luck yet - there are
just so many other demands on the limited funds the library has available.
Dave
--
These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
/*********************************************************************/
/* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */
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