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Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server.

Not in this case, apparently; they're public domain. Although JSTOR did foot the bill for the scanning.

I'll take your other point, though: if there's real evil in the academic publishing world, it's Elsevier.

The point is that this action and aaronsw's action make JSTOR look like the villain while JSTOR are rather sitting on the good side of the battle.

(On the other hand, these actions do contribute to create public awareness so I still haven't decided if they are good or not)

it seems JSTOR is not pressing charges.

Good thing that reproducing something, no matter how laborious the process, is not considered a creative act in the US.

No, but (IIRC) compilations that take serious effort to produce have a copyright on them, e.g. the phone book.

The content doesn't, actually. I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses. They do have copyright claims to the font choice, layout, etc., so you can't copy the phone book wholesale, but you can take the phone numbers, rearrange them, and set them in a different typeface and you'd be in the clear.

I don't believe there's any part of copyright that takes the amount of effort into account. There was a case (again, I'll look it up when I get home) where a copy of a work that was in the public domain was granted its own copyright because it had a few errors in it. The errors were unintentional, but copyright was given. In the phone book case, the court specifically mentioned that even though there was no doubt a significant amount of work required to produce the phone book, that didn't give the publisher copyright.

> I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses.

Feist v. Rural

Yep, that's the one. The other one I was thinking of was Alfred Bell & Co. v. Catalda Fine Arts.

No, the phone book most specifically doesn't - which is why you get five phone books nowadays as competing companies try to sell ads all at once.

What about Springer or Nature publishing? Unfortunately, the real evil is rooted in a system that measures excellence based on publishing records and not scientific impact. Until there's a replacement for that, life scientists will keep sheepishly bowing to the publishers. That replacement could be an idea for a startup.

> Unfortunately, the real evil is rooted in a system that measures excellence based on publishing records and not scientific impact

Can you clarify this a bit? How do you get to have impact without first publishing it somewhere (at least mildly reputable) and having other people actually read it/review it/run with it?

My ideal system would be a global open system where scientists would publish their results, not papers. Other scientists would be able to review, confirm and reuse your results transparently and third parties would be able to assess your position from your record and the feedback that you get from fellow scientists. That could involve many more signals rather than just the (journal+number of citations) that everyone uses now.

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