Am I alone in seeing the contradictions, of people defending for-profit science publishing, using a vehicle whose very existence is predicated on government funded science and technology coming with 'its free' as a requirement?
Is it contradictory to support an industry which does that while supporting this? Would you be for the liberation of Google's property?
Publishers are the "gateway" to science, and they have cornered that market, using publicly funded science.
Google is the "gateway" to search, built largely using publicly funded science. Facebook is the gateway to online social interaction, and is again built largely using publicly funded science. Et cetera.
Publishers are not mere discovery services - they are gatekeepers, not portals.
The big publishers are public parasites that make money off the work of other people and through controlling information and progress. The quicker they go into the dustbin of history the better. My issue is less with the argument and more with the general sentiment.
I don't understand how we can get outraged that companies like Elsevier operate this way when it is fundamentally the same closed model that is so prevalent in tech. I don't imagine as an industry we are so self-unaware, contradictory, or (to use a less nice word) hypocritical, but the sentiment doesn't match with the actions of this industry. where does the disconnect come from?
We celebrate piracy in this thread, but if these same tactics were turned on almost any company represented on HN, it would not be seen as a virtue.
They're totally different. If tech were like academic publishing, software would be developed in publicly-subsidized studios and then given, for free, to for-profit distributors. These distributors would play no significant part in the development of the software, but would happily charge the public an arm and a leg for any usage of it.
Or you implement IETF RfCs. There's an FTP server with all standards documents. If you have just email but no Internet yet (think uucp mail or bbs), there's a service where you can request documents to be sent to you.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
Brand wasn't a naive utopian; he acutely understood the conflicts that the internet would bring about.
There are moments which are not. I think their smarts behind ad placement logic and the ML derived stuff may be trade secret not patent. I believe their use of patents acquired through Motorola was defensive not offensive but I disliked that move.
Google exploit first mover advantage and category killer scale as much as IPR. If they used IPR as much as apple do, to defend the indefensible (slide to open for goodness sake) I'd repudiate that.
I don't entirely like Google. In this space is see them as a lesser evil than say SCO or Oracle
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@pwinnski - This is likely either a dialect or national language issue. In the US, at least the section where I am from, freeways are what you might call highways. They have no traffic lights, are high speed, and have toll booths for entry and spread along them at intervals. Hence the reason I stated their naming quite ironic! They are built by government, but are not freely available. Responding here since hacker news seems to stop you from replying in a thread once something you post has been mass downvoted.
You may be conflating price with cost, but the two are not the same. The government funding of the cost of freeways means that the price is free to all users.
However yes, public highways cost money to maintain. They can’t be truly free unless the construction and maintenance were free - donated land and volunteer labour? Right. Otherwise somebody has to pay for it.
Frankly it’s potentially the same way with published scientific papers, we do need a system of professional peer review. That could be voluntary, but would probably be better if it were independently funded in some way. ArXiv is one approach but I’m not sure it’s a complete solution.
So to fit the road tax model - we already pay for research. So let's add 0.0001$ extra tax for publishing, and kill off the current publishers.
If the complaint is that roads require maintenance and are therefore not free, that's a torture of the word.