Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Is it any surprise that the fed is attacking torrent sites? Even a tech news site puts incorrect titles on its news articles.
He didn't upload papers to the Pirate Bay, he uploaded a 165kb torrent file to the Pirate Bay.
It may sound like semantics but it has real legal repercussions.
It's like saying that the documents were mailed via TNT.
To many people the distinction you point out is meaningless.
Awkward.
'torrented at' seems to be emerging as the favoured idiom denoting the hosting of a torrent file.
Locking in of the worlds historical knowledge is even worse, I think, than locking in current research. The economic return to the holders of the keys to the garden have no moral or legal right to assert control over the this knowledge, when their articles of incorporation most likely expose the oposite of their actions. These organizations are greedy wholesale hypocrites.
Even if the works are in the public domain, the copies that you maintain are yours and you can charge for access to those copies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Books
Publishing works that are in the public domain is their bread and butter.
If these documents really are under public domain, then JSTOR can't stop people from distributing the copies obtained from them. However, it is possible for JSTOR to claim copyright on the form of the distributed copies, but not the content (assuming the papers are in the public domain). That is, if they had a JSTOR logo on the papers, or something 'unique', JSTOR may have a basis for claiming copyright infringement. This is assuming they were actually obtained legally, and JSTOR didn't have a strange TOS.
I am not a native English speaker, and the term public domain was not self-explanatory (rather, it explained itself in the wrong way).
In Hungarian, public domain means közkincs, which is roughly equivalent to "treasure of the public". So the question seemed reasonable to ask.
Why should we have to pay for a scientific paper if it was produced by a public funded institution?
What's the long term effect on the spread and advancement of knowledge if access is restricted and "gamed" for profit?
If he's sued (against assuming I properly understand the issues here) I'll probably contribute to his defence because he's acting in everyone's interest.
and not just in publishing.
there's particularly one practice that I find particularly distasteful, and that is the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publicaion on papers. either to market the paper itself ("ooh, look, I have a famous professor's name next to mine!") or to boost the publication list of some tenured has-been.
a few years ago there was a scandal here in Norway. a doctor got caught fabricating research results. as the shitstorm hit the media his "co-authors" (none of which seemed to have done any of the work or the writing, and some of which denied even knowing about the paper) ran for cover. oh and how they ran.
I must say that I found it somewhat questionable that they didn't get thrown out of academia for having put their name on a piece of fraudulent bullshit. if the paper was good enough to put their name on it should be good enough to stand by.
it ought to be a mandatory practice to mark these frauds in publication lists and databases as such: frauds.
most I have talked to who are still in academia defend the practice. and when they run out of sensible arguments in its favor, which they inevitably do, they go with the old "well, it is how it is done. so we shouldn't rock the boat".
quite a few of these people have a change of heart after leaving academia. or after having a re-think about ethics and honesty and why it really, really matters if you are to call what you are doing "science".
Well scientists are no less irrational than the rest of us, and why would anyone in a position of power ever be interested in changing the status quo?
I agree with you that people that have not contributed should not be on a paper. For most high impact journals thesedays explanation is required of who did what. Of course this is far from 100% secure but it's an interesting step. Lying about the contribution of a certain co-author is something else than just adding a name to the list. Lying is fraud whereas adding a name might not actually be fraud I think.
I heard an argument that I find difficult to take down: even though you may write a paper alone, the research it is based on probably wasn't done alone. Even if you did your research alone, it likely stands on the research done by your lab mates. Even if it doesn't, you don't really work alone. You talk to people, most notably your advisor, or your research director (depending on your position). Whether you know it or not, those conversations gives your insights that shouldn't go un-thanked.
The bottom line is, it's a team, and the signature should reflect that (non-)reality.
The argument you cite does not support listing all those folks as authors. For example, one could have papers "Authored by X, featuring original research by J, K, and L".
For that matter, your suggestion to classify the various authors by the nature of their contribution should shatter my argument to pieces. Adding something like "supervised by C" should blow those pieces to smithereens.
Another reason they are so expensive might be that the reprints are almost always expenses against research grants, so there is little in the way of "market forces" working to keep the price commensurate with the true value.
It's going to be very difficult to break.
Essentially, the idea is to remove, or at the least, decrease, political influence over science. The problem right now is that very few scientists can research things which actually interest them. Often, they are working for a company which is attempting to make more money, or the military, which is attempting to kill more people, or academia, where the idea is to get the most prestige. All of those things directly decrease the quality of research and have no place in science.
As a scientist, I could go onto this site, write up a hypothesis and outline the experiment that needs to be performed to test it. Then, people who have an interest in the particular piece of research could provide funding, loan equipment or even directly contribute by becoming part of the team. After the experiment has been completed, the results are released in the public domain (this also helps to break up the monopoly that scientific publication have). Crowd sourcing is then utilised to verify the findings and discuss their implications.
To put it another way, science should be something that everyone can do, given enough free time and determination, yet, as things are, only a select few get to do this and often have to deal with mountains of politics to get to that stage.
A better system would also allow for the release of negative data.
It's difficult, but it's already working. PLoS journals are actually quite reputable, currently.
Xiph is an organization that respects software patents. (As opposed to various other multimedia efforts like VideoLAN and libav that ignore them).
I dare to say: For science!