> 'This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all 
> from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be  
> available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made 
> available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited 
> access to the  documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, 
> though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing 
> access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of 
> thousands of dollars.
>
> ...When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to 
> Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource - where they could be 
> tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context 
> to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by 
> William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally 
> disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about 
> its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)
>
> But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: 
> publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from 
> the publishers. As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that 
> their slavish reproduction - scanning the documents - created a new copyright 
> interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial 
> watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might 
> even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the 
> files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.
>
> In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the 
> potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful 
> action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal 
> Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and 
> morally everyone's property.'

--User:Gmaxwell,
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro

> 'We're projecting today that 2010-11 revenue will have increased 49% from 
> 2009-10 actuals, to $23.8 million. Spending is projected to have increased 
> 103% from 2009-10 actuals, to $18.5 million. This means we added $5.3 million 
> to the reserve, for a projected end-of-year total of $19.5 million which 
> represents 8.3 months of reserves at the 2011-12 spending level.
>
> ...We started the year with an ambitious plan to grow the Wikimedia 
> Foundation staff 82% from 50 to 91 and a decision to, if necessary, sacrifice 
> speed for quality (“hiring well rather than hiring quickly”). We expect to 
> end the year with staff of 78, representing an increase over 2009-10 of 56%.'

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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