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The Elsevier boycott one year on

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Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#21

Post by rayiner »

octotod wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so digital data is reproducible at near-zero marginal cost, and so there is a moral obligation to distribute it for zero cost to anyone who will benefit from it. Let's generalize this principle. There are physical goods that are reproducible for very low marginal costs. Clothes, food, etc, medicine, etc, are all very cheap to produce in large quantities. Is there a moral obligation to provide those goods--not f…

If the up-front cost of producing the first instance of the product is paid by society, as is often the case with the type of work published in Elsevier journals, than it does seem fair to distribute the product back to members of the funding society at the marginal cost (which is not quite zero, as hosting, editing, and curating do have costs). The analogy can be made between scientific funding body and investor, wh…

It's not really fair to say that the up front costs are paid by society. First, roughly half of university R&D budgets come from government funding. Second, even if the development of a product is fully funded by government money does not mean the government has fully paid for the result.

E.g. say the government gives me a $1 million grant to pay the costs of developing some military technology. As part of the bargain, I get to keep any commercialization rights. Should the resulting technology be free to the public? No. Nobody sane works simply to cover their costs. The commercialization rights are my profit in the arrangement. If I had known that they would be rendered useless by the government giving away the resulting technology, I wouldn't have settled for a grant that simply covered my costs--I would have bargained for costs + profit.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#22

Post by clicks »

rayiner wrote: post #20
clicks wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are physical goods that are reproducible for very low marginal costs. Clothes, food, etc, medicine, etc, are all very cheap to produce in large quantities. Is there a moral obligation to provide those goods--not for free but for their low marginal cost, to anyone who will prosper from it? A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purpose…

> A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.…

Oops, sorry I misread you.

> If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?

If it were up to me, it would be -- or roughly something like that. But I have supposedly radical views on a lot of things (FWIW I affiliate to a local socialist party). I think a lot of the decisions made by big pharmaceutical companies, retail corporations, etc. are morally reprehensible. To give you a more direct answer of why I do not go down the streets at night shouting for change on this: because it'll be much harder for me to achieve that change. It'll be much harder for me to be an influencing force of bringing about a system I would be happy with. But because I am someone of a technical background, this fight is the fight I choose to participate in. Also, charging something $3 for something that has a marginal cost of $3 sounds kind of lousy -- I'm sure there's got to be a more elegant way of doing that. :)

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#23

Post by rayiner »

clicks wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.…

Oops, sorry I misread you. > If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3? If it were up to me, it would be -- or roughly something like that. But I have supposedly radical views on a lot of things (FWIW I affiliate to a local…

I disagree with you, but admire your consistency. I think a lot of people pushing for "free information" draw an arbitrary distinction between digital things that are almost free to reproduce and physical things that are fairly cheap to reproduce.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#24

Post by ScottBurson »

rayiner wrote: post #8

This "free as in speech" == "free as in beer" shtick has become weird. When you're more fundamentalist than RMS it's time to step back and introspect.

I think you're mistaken about why the authors are doing this. It's not fundamentalism; they just don't like to see the effort they invest in writing and reviewing these papers go to enriching the publisher while they, the mathematicians and scientists, don't see a dime out of it.

Basically, the publishers have figured out a way to insert themselves as parasites into the system, based on the fact that many academics must publish or perish. They charge substantial rents and contribute little if any value. Mostly, they coordinate the peer reviews (for which they don't pay a dime) and handle the actual printing (of little value anymore).

It's very difficult for any individual actor in the system to opt out of using them. Untenured professors need to publish ("or perish", as they say); they are not in a position to take a stand on this issue. Libraries are disincented from cancelling individual journal subscriptions by clever bundling by the publishers.

I can understand why people wouldn't want to continue to be taken advantage of in this manner. I wouldn't either.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#25

Post by jhuni »

rayiner wrote: post #17
clicks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see the "free information" people as the antithesis of that. They don't just want to share what they create. They want to share what you create. And I see that as an impingement on freedom. I think the way the "free information" people see things is that a free and easy, attractive accessibility of knowledge (or more generally, information) is needed for anyone to truly prosper in their life, and for humanity to…

Okay, so digital data is reproducible at near-zero marginal cost, and so there is a moral obligation to distribute it for zero cost to anyone who will benefit from it. Let's generalize this principle. There are physical goods that are reproducible for very low marginal costs. Clothes, food, etc, medicine, etc, are all very cheap to produce in large quantities. Is there a moral obligation to provide those goods--not f…

If you destroy considerable amounts of food to profit off of a reduced food supply that is as reprehensible as using copyright to profit off of an artificially scarce supply of useful information. In general, artificially limiting the supply of any useful good is always unacceptable.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#26

Post by rayiner »

ScottBurson wrote: post #24
rayiner wrote: post #8

This "free as in speech" == "free as in beer" shtick has become weird. When you're more fundamentalist than RMS it's time to step back and introspect.

I think you're mistaken about why the authors are doing this. It's not fundamentalism; they just don't like to see the effort they invest in writing and reviewing these papers go to enriching the publisher while they, the mathematicians and scientists, don't see a dime out of it. Basically, the publishers have figured out a way to insert themselves as parasites into the system, based on the fact that many academics m…

The journals offer a service: branding and aggregation. There is nothing devious about it like you're implying (not any more devious than Google making money from aggregating other peoples' news articles). Your disagreement seems to be with the value of the service, and I think that's just a matter of you undervaluing branding and signaling. There are a lot of people who write a lot of tripe. Kooks, quacks, etc. Any of them can put their crap up on the internet (they're called blogs). What the journals offer is a branding that certain articles rise above a minimal level threshold of value, and a central point of accessing such articles.

Nobody is forced to use their service. Your point that untenured professors must "publish or perish" doesn't fully analyze the situation. Tenure committees have no intrinsic reason to favor these publishers. They care only to the extent that these publishers have the brand that signals to them and others: "hey, this author doesn't completely suck."

Now, the publishers largely inherited these brands, from back when publishing was a more involved process involving paper. But there is nothing nefarious keeping them in the system. Any open access publisher could rise up tomorrow and as long as they could develop the brand and signaling power they could take on the publishers. But regardless of anything else, branding, sorting, filtering, and signaling are things people want, even more than free and easy access to information. And the publishers stay in the loop because they offer those things.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#27

Post by jhuni »

rayiner wrote: post #14
clicks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts? If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator. Near 8 minutes in, he says this: This is the introduction to the free s…

He loses me at "zero marginal cost." What is the here or there of the "marginal" part? "Zero marginal cost" is not the same as "zero cost." Since when do people have a right to receive things for their marginal cost? What difference does it make whether that marginal cost is zero or very small? I love free software. But one of the things I love about the free software community is that it is self-sufficient. It respe…

Why do you value the freedom of profit-driven megacorporations to profit off of their exclusive control of intellectual private property over the freedom to share information with one's friends and neighbours?

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#28

Post by rayiner »

jhuni wrote: post #27
rayiner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He loses me at "zero marginal cost." What is the here or there of the "marginal" part? "Zero marginal cost" is not the same as "zero cost." Since when do people have a right to receive things for their marginal cost? What difference does it make whether that marginal cost is zero or very small? I love free software. But one of the things I love about the free software community is that it is self-sufficient. It respe…

Why do you value the freedom of profit-driven megacorporations to profit off of their exclusive control of intellectual private property over the freedom to share information with one's friends and neighbours?

I could very well twist that and say: I value the freedom of hard-working content creators to make money from their labor over the freedom of teenagers to get free copies of popular movies and video games, but I won't because the nature of the parties in question is really irrelevant to me.

I value the freedom of creators of original works. Without them, there would be nothing to share. I don't care of those creators are profit-driven mega-corporations or starving artists. I think in a digital, connected age, the moral right to one's intellectual creations becomes stronger, not weaker.[1] I'm perfectly supportive of people who chose to share their original work, but I respect that some people don't want to share, or control the terms of that sharing, and that is their prerogative.

[1] Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. But would anyone play the game if you could just click on someone's weapon that he stole off a dragon (or whatever it is you do in WoW--I've never played it) and have your own copy?

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#29

Post by clicks »

rayiner wrote: post #28
jhuni wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you value the freedom of profit-driven megacorporations to profit off of their exclusive control of intellectual private property over the freedom to share information with one's friends and neighbours?

I could very well twist that and say: I value the freedom of hard-working content creators to make money from their labor over the freedom of teenagers to get free copies of popular movies and video games, but I won't because the nature of the parties in question is really irrelevant to me. I value the freedom of creators of original works. Without them, there would be nothing to share. I don't care of those creators…

> Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. But would anyone play the game if you could just click on someone's weapon that he stole off a dragon (or whatever it is you do in WoW--I've never played it) and have your own copy?

Not a very good analogy to demonstrate your point, as the scarcity of resources within the game is a central facet of the gameplay.

rayiner, I often see you as the lone man arguing on these things -- about information being free, journals being freely accessible, etc. You're unconvinced as of yet -- so I want to make the recommendation of two of Lawrence Lessig's books to you: Free culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)) and Remix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_(book)) -- both freely available for download on a CC license I should add. :)

You're a great writer and I wish more people engaged with you on the points you raise. If you go on to read the two books, I would be genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#30

Post by anonymouz »

tylerneylon wrote: post #11

I'd say the boycott has reached the point of crossing the chasm into adoption by mainstream users. There are still new people signing up all the time, but the pace is low. A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don…

"A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don't they just do that? To editors, the question is: how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals."

That seems pretty far-fetched. Lots of Open Access journals and preprint platforms exist, and there is no evidence that lack of a suitable software platform is a limitation. The problem is more one of those new outlets gaining sufficient reputation to be trusted by more people (and hiring comittees) and figuring out how they should sustain themselves financially.

With the more adventurous approaches the main problem is once again coming up with a model that is actually better and then convincing a whole scientific community to drop their current approach and make their careers depend on a new publishing model. Writing the software is easy by comparison.

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