This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this:
"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports.
The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]
Back when I was much younger (CDROMs had just become accessible with read speeds of 150Kb/s) I had an idea to publish volumes of case law on a CDROM. After seeing no technical reason why the idea couldn't work I hit a brick wall. Turns out the case law is free, but the pagination is copyright. Case Law is cited by the page number and without that common 'index' the citations are meaningless. At that time I was convinced that things are broken to the advantage of those who profit/monopolize a product or service. This was in the late 80's, and my drive to disrupt didn't exist.
Case law is free as in beer and free as in speech.
What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases. As a practical matter, these additional features are indispensable, so the text of the opinions alone is of relatively less value.
Give Google access to all of the raw documents, and they will gladly cross-reference, index, etc all of the cases. I'd be willing to bet money that they will make it available for free, and wouldn't be surprised if they do a better job than Lexis Nexis or West Law do.
The one thing that Google likely wouldn't do is edit. But that's because they can't do that by algorithm.
>> What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases.
Sure. But they are paid with public dollars to do this work, and so are effectively working for the public. Therefore, their contract should state that their work must be made public.
Really, it shouldn't matter to them whether they get the right to sell copies or get paid more up front for the work; they make money either way. But it matters for democracy.
Can you provide a link? I am not a lawyer, but I have seen http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm which provides a link to the LexisNexis website for opinions from 1850 - Present.
The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial, use."
From this, I assumed commercial use would require purchasing or licensing something from LexisNexis.
It's almost like it would be nice if a hacker used library access to download a bunch of federal court electronic records and provided public access to them, possibly with the assistance of a major university.
Spare us your sarcasm. What you want is already available via http://bulk.resource.org There is no copyright on judicial or legislative proceedings, nor any restrictions upon their distribution.
It is now. Wasn't that the whole reason aaronsw liberated PACER? (I honestly still don't understand all the parts of the federal court publication system; PACER, the commercial stuff like Lexis/Nexis, physical records, aaronsw's actions, etc. -- there are a lot of fairly undocumented parts)
Carl Malamud is the person behind resource.org. aaronsw downloaded several million documents breaking PACER's TOS, but no action was taken. The archive and 'firehose' feeds on resource.org are mainly thanks to a long-running lobbying campaign by Malamud and others. The PACER system is semi-free to access but part of why it has overhead costs is that it's integrated with ECF, which attorneys use to file documents in Federal court. The cost structure is a legacy of its heritage as a document retrieval system used in brick & mortar court offices where the per-page cost was tied to the paper and printing overhead. Copyright has never been an issue in regards to PACER.
Try getting them in bulk for free, so you can republish them.
Or not through lexis/westlaw's website, for free.
(I'm cheating a bit here, I've actually been a part of fighting this fight for a very long time.)
Note that these exclusive contracts are also longer term than one would think.
Numerous reputable folks and and reputable companies have offered to host the opinions in bulk, for free, at no cost to the courts, as well as providing search/etc. However, the courts hurt for real budget, and they all see selling these contracts as a revenue source.
(I'm generalizing to both state and federal courts here)
In the case of PACER (you may remember PACER from stories about Aaron Swartz :P), it sadly makes up for a lot of budget shortfall in the courts. PACER's revenue is > 100 million a year.
If you want to hear the long sad story, you can probably find a number of writings by Carl Malamud talking about it.
If you just want to get angry, it would suffice to check out the lawsuits over trying to claim copyright in the page numbering between westlaw and lexis, etc.
You would have to hire a lawyer in any state due to the sheer number of laws; this seems to say in CA that lawyer also has to buy public domain papers from a private entity.
Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for the petition to hit the 25k threshold.
The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about this topic.
In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and there are many stakeholders.
The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The journal industry's argument is that any attempt to open up research will reduce their revenues, and kill jobs.
The view of most people in this debate is that the journal industry makes far too much money off research, and therefore the size of the industry should be reduced. But in this economic context being branded as a job killer is toxic.
The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
>The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing being used to marshall this data?
It's a good question. I expect that the Office of Science and Technology is working on it to some extent, but I am not aware of how deep their efforts are.
Ugh, if they delay important things like health care, copyright reform and the economy over gun reform, I'll be angry.
I mean, guns are a minor issue. Make them freely available, and some crime stats change somewhat. Completely ban them and do away with 2A, and some crime stats change somewhat, and destroy a relatively small industry. It's not a huge issue either way. Tiny compared to the overall economy, or overseas wars, or the drug war, health care, or copyright, or STEM education, or immigration reform.
The White House hasn't had time to respond to this petition because they've been busy responding to more important ones - like "begin construction of a Death Star by 2016".
The Death Star one was simple, so it is easy to respond to. The research one is complicated. To move from the current system to one where were everything is available at no cost, without compromising peer review and without making it much harder for working scientists to follow the important developments in their field, is a hard problem.
I'm confused - this link seems to be for a petition that's several months old, already past the deadline, and already reached the threshold number of signatures?
And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?
It hasn't been responded to. I'm under the impression that more signatures might increase the probability of response? If not, should we start a new one?
If we start a new petition, I will delete this submission.
Under "Helpful hints" on the right of this petition:
Creating a duplicate or similar petition will make it harder for you to get an official response. Instead, sign and help promote the one that has already been created.
"After a user creates a petition, he or she will receive a direct link to that petition that may be sent to friends, posted on social networks, or otherwise shared in order to gain signatures for the petition. If the petition meets a pre-set signature threshold within a designated time period, the petition will become visible to individuals browsing or searching the White House website. If enough users sign the petition to reach a second pre-set signature threshold within that time period, the White House commits to respond to the petition in a timely fashion. The White House may also elect to respond to any petition before it reaches the first or second threshold. Once the White House responds to a petition, it is closed to additional signatures."
That last sentence implies that a petition will continue accepting signatures, irrespective of any thresholds or deadlines, right up to the point where a response is posted. Surely that means that there is great value in continuing to promote and sign this original petition? A steady stream of signatures over time would attract attention in the system and demonstrate ongoing support. Eventually it might grow to the point where it is impossible to ignore.
Indeed, the signature count is still ticking over (gone from 53136 to 53149 in the last 15 minutes). Listing "popular" petitions [2] shows that the petition is significant, currently ranking #8 in terms of number of signatures collected.
This would be nice but how is this going to be payed for? Research budgets are already being squeezed pretty tight given how much the sponsoring organization takes(universities ...), research costs, and congressional attempts to cut funding I just don't see it happening anytime soon. It already costs quite a bit to publish.
The basic idea is that the research papers should be open access 6 months after publication. 6 months is enough for publishers to recoup their costs of publication.
The reality is that publishers make all their money from site licenses. Harvard, e.g., will spend $15 million a year on subscriptions to various publishers like Elsevier, in return for access to all the new papers, and the back catalog.
Most papers that are downloaded, around 80%, are from the back catalog anyway, meaning that universities are incredibly price insensitive with respect to site license subscriptions. Journals could offer the new papers for free, and still universities would pay for the site license subscription.
This is what has happened with the arxiv: most new papers in theoretical physics are on there for free, and yet physics departments still subscribe to the theoretical physics journals. Why is that? It's because the departments need access to papers in the back catalog, which are not on the arxiv.
The upshot of this is that site license revenue wouldn't be affected by requiring open access on research 6 months after publication (or even 3 months, or 0 months, in my view). There is enough price insensitivity in the system for existing revenues to be unaffected by a change like this.
The reason the journal industry hates legislation like this, despite it not posing an economic danger to them, is that they are worried about the general trend of the government getting involved in changing the scientific publishing industry.
The journal industry would like to freeze their business model in the form that it was in during the pre-internet days. They believe that it's in their interest to fight every piece of pro-change legislation that the government suggests, in order to slow down the rate of change.
Fees != costs. If all the work of preparing research for publication (getting it in the proper format, adding proper metadata, etc.) is done by the researcher, I don't see how it would cost that much to host it. Server/electricity/admin costs, of course, but given that scientific papers aren't exactly most high-traffic website on the planet, and marketing/etc. is not needed I don't see it as unmanageable costs. US government and various departments run hundreds of websites by now, getting one more there wouldn't be that great marginal cost.
All NIH-funded research must result in open access publications. How does it work? Basically.. the NIH set up a website and the journals submit NIH-funded papers there, where they are freely available.
What are you talking about? The requirement would be that the articles be published in open access journals, or else published elsewhere after being published initially in closed access journals.
The high prices you linked too aren't an impediment, they are THE REASON TO DO IT.
Also, when it comes to tax payer funded research, it's already, you know, funded.
The high prices are the costs to publish articles in open access journals. Somebody has to pay the costs of publishing, and it's currently either subscribers (traditional journals) or authors (open access journals).
A mail server and website combination is cheap to build. Your only cost is bandwidth.
The only real cost is bandwidth. That's when you have the schools host these cheap servers. "instead of 15 million USD, we want to colo. Deal?"
And to completely trounce your idea, publishing is easy for journals. It's called "load page and press print". There's hardly any reason to print tomes that can easily loaded ip on a web page as needed. And if you need a bound book, go to lulu or other JIT publisher.
Publishing is not referring to printing the physical journals (no one is arguing that those should be free).
Publishing refers to the work done by editors, copyeditors, typesetters, etc. Without those paid employees the quality of journals would drop significantly.
You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.
Very few people understand how the academic publishing industry works, so don't be so fast to smack this person down. The fact is that the authors do all the content and technical editing work, and unpaid volunteers do all the peer review work, and depending on journal, either underpaid or unpaid editors do the coordinating between then, with the exception of very few top journals. The publishers generally do the typesetting, which is a minimal amount of work compared to everything else, and hold the exclusive license to distribute the work, which is essentially all the value of the paper. Most will force authors to give them the exclusive right to destroy people's lives for copyright reasons without the author's consent.
"So by your judgement, all these folks could be sacked and nothing of value would be lost?"
I would argue that value would be gained by sacking these people (and organizations).
Most of the money they (and other journals) uses is dependent on excessive licensing fees charged to universities. The universities turn around and add that to each person's tuition.
And all the work the journal publishes WAS owned by the students of the very university, until the journal demands transfer of copyright to the journal... So they can sell them back work at 1000X the profit.
By definition, they are parasites. What we need is a good anti-parasitic medicine.
We're talking about open access stuff like PLoS, though. They don't charge licensing fees to universities, they don't typically demand copyright transfer, etc. Try to stay on topic.
Basically.. the question is, is it possible for an open access journal to be run for orders of magnitude less money than every existing open access journal currently in existence? You seem to think the answer is "definitely yes", but you haven't explained why. What is your insight that has been missed by so many others?
Doesn't matter. Just require that peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly funded research also be posted on the arXiv. This is how it's done anyways in physics.
Not many people waive the fee currently. If a lot of people did, it would be a huge problem for publishers like PLoS and they would have to change their practices.
Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was making http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 so citing PLoS as an example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue he was raising, not a rebuttal.
It's expensive because the journals are leaches sucking money and IP out of the system. The research was funded by the people, so why should the journals get the rights? The same institutions that are paying big bugs are also the ones contributing all the content. All the reviewing is even done by researchers who end up paying for the journal and contribut to it. It's sickening how the scientific community and the public at large get exploited by those leaches!
This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this way to begin with?
Because before you set it up, you don't know there's a problem. Sure, you can say that everyone should get access to the research from the start, but when the framework for federal grants started, the cost of distributing journals was tied to shipping physical copies. No one had to think about whether or not you could legally share it because you had a much higher barrier in the logistics of sharing it. Now those things are still around through organizational inertia. The companies that existed to fill the (necessary) service of printing and shipping all these things don't want to become obsolete. It's not a good reason to keep it around, but it's why you need more than zero effort to change.
I agree. It's not an unreasonable thing to have to bring to the government's attention considering how quickly technology allowed for these advancements to occur.
It is ridiculous that the response is taking forever and that they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.
> they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't
going to be built.
There is no political fallout from refusing to build a death star.
The Republican Party's rapid backpedaling after publishing a memo outlining what many HN'ers consider a reasonable policy stance on copyright -- to the extent of firing the staffer who prepared it, never mind that it appears he got permission from the appropriate party channels to publish it as a policy document -- show that the copyright lobby has on its side some of the finest politicians that money can buy.
Because the article title is misleading. Purely publicly-funded research is freely available (e.g. NASA reports). What's at issue are e.g. papers written pursuant to research that is the subject of public funds, but by research teams who are otherwise employed by a university or research lab. In that case, the resulting paper isn't purely a product of public funding, so it's not obvious it should automatically be freely accessible.
Also, these papers are generally the result of editing/publication processes by journals. The government isn't paying for those papers to be edited and published.
To some extent, they are though. Most peer reviewers are not paid for their time; instead, they are largely federally-funded academics. The journals have an incredible racket: they don't pay for their raw inputs, and they get a lot of their value-added for free as well. Since there's been a large shift away from the dead-tree versions being critical for researchers, the cost of transporting bits is a lot lower than stacks of paper.
How many such petitions have there been that have been popular enough to warrant a response? 100? Of those, how many have led to actual changes in policy? Has there been any example of a successful whitehouse.gov petition?
Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.
Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the word about Carmen Ortiz.
The NIH has been working hard at getting all NIH-funded research publications into a free database, PubMed Central. And I'm pretty sure all publications listed on CVs for NIH grant applications must include a PubMed Central ID.
"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports.
The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California [0]
http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ [1]