Free for a Fee

The content in this post was found at https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/us-government-to-make-all-research-it-funds-open-access-on-publication/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Tech Dirt
Glyn Moody
Nov. 25, 2020

Two years ago, Techdirt wrote about Plan S, an initiative from top research funders that requires all work they support to be published as open access. It’s one of the most important moves to get publicly-funded work made freely available, and as such has been widely welcomed. Except by publishers, of course, who have enjoyed profit margins of 35-40% under the current system, which sees libraries and others pay for subscriptions in order to read public research. But Plan S is too big to ignore, not least after the powerful Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation joined the coalition behind it. So publishers have instead come up with ways to subvert the whole idea of making knowledge freely available in order to maintain profits. The latest and perhaps most blatant example of this has come from Springer Nature, the publisher of the journal Nature, widely regarded as one of the top two science titles in the world (the other being Science). Here’s what Nature the publisher is doing, reported by Nature the journal:

From 2021, the publisher will charge €9,500, US$11,390 or £8,290 to make a paper open access (OA) in Nature and 32 other journals that currently keep most of their articles behind paywalls and are financed by subscriptions. It is also trialing a scheme that would halve that price for some journals, under a common-review system that might guide papers to a number of titles.

The research will indeed by freely available to the world, but the authors’ institutions have to cough up the massive sum of $11,000 for every article.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201125/02325845767/good-news-academics-can-make-their-articles-published-top-journal-nature-freely-available-as-open-access-bad-news-they-must-pay.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Glyn Moody
Tech Dirt
March 4, 2019
As Techdirt has reported over the years, the move to open access, whereby anyone can read academic papers for free, is proving a long, hard journey. However, the victories are starting to build up, and here’s another one that could have important wider ramifications for open access, especially in the US:

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.

In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC’s 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190304/09220141728/big-win-open-access-as-university-california-cancels-all-elsevier-subscriptions-worth-11-million-dollars-year.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

TechDirt

Glyn Moody

Fri, Aug 17th 2018

The key idea behind open access is that everyone with an Internet connection should be able to read academic papers without needing to pay for them. Or rather without needing to pay again, since most research is funded using taxpayers’ money. It’s hard to argue against that proposition, or that making information available in this way is likely to increase the rate at which medical and scientific discoveries are made for the benefit of all. And yet, as Techdirt has reported, academic publishers that often enjoy profit margins of 30-40% have adopted a range of approaches to undermine open access and its aims — and with considerable success. A recent opinion column in the Canadian journal University Affairs explains how traditional publishers have managed to subvert open access for their own benefit:

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180816/06022140441/as-academic-publishers-fight-subvert-open-access-preprints-offer-alternative-approach-sharing-knowledge-widely.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

IP Watchdog

Steve Brachmann
June 27, 2018

[ed’s note: just because arguments about software patents v. open source can be incredibly detailed and convoluted, doesn’t mean that we should or shouldn’t allow software patents. HOWEVER . . . criteria for deciding what’s best IS muddy and neither the courts nor the USPTO have much helped. One is almost tempted to say: “maybe this is an area where market forces should prevail since the government is never going to get it right.” On the other hand, our experience with THAT, in the tech sector, is an open invitation for monopoly rather than innovation. Sigh.]

The idea that all software is obvious is a theoretical argument that doesn’t just border on the scattological, it wades right into the sewer. Consider artificial intelligence. If AI, which requires the use of software algorithms, is supposed to augment human intelligence and provide us with answers to questions we can’t figure out without the use of AI, how is that at all obvious? What about IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform? … When the highest court in the land incorporates such backward-minded patterns of thought which allows them to say that “At its most basic, a computer is just a calculator capable of performing mental steps faster than a human could,” the U.S. patent system must be a relative paradise to Duda and other anti-patent Luddites who believe that software inventions cannot and should not be patentable at all.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/27/google-luddites-patent-battle/id=98454/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

IP Watchdog
Jie Lian
July 9, 2018

[ed notes: This ruling/case could be ENORMOUSLY important in the open source v proprietary software space]

The Federal Circuit recently decided the case of Oracle America v. Google Inc. To “attract Java developers to build apps for Android,” Google copied the declaring code, but wrote its own implementing code for the 37 Java API packages. Id at 1187.  Previously, the Federal Circuit held that “[the] declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization (‘SSO’) of the Java API packages are entitled to copyright protection.” .  On the other hand, the Federal Circuit also recognized that a reasonable jury could find that “the functional aspects of the packages” are “relevant to Google’s fair use defense.” In this key decision that has the potential to rock the software industry, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the jury verdict and found that “Google’s use of the 37 Java API packages was not fair as a matter of law.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/07/09/oracle-america-v-google-free-java-fair-or-unfair/id=98763/Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com.