
The Elsevier boycott one year on - tokenadult
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-elsevier-boycott-one-year-on/
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aswanson
I would like to see a similar effort directed towards the IEEE and Acm
publishing associations. They both leech off of publicly funded research and
impede scientific and technological progress with their myriad paywalls.

~~~
scott_s
They are professional organizations, not just publishers. As professional
organizations, their primary goal is to support their members and the
betterment of the field. They may not always have paywalls; unlike Elsivier,
their organization exists for purposes other than getting money from
publications.

The co-chairs of the ACM Publishing Board recently wrote an editorial,
"Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future":
[http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-
acm-...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-for-an-
open-access-future/fulltext)

It's not enough, but it's a start, and I'm hopeful. I am a member of both the
ACM and IEEE, and I want both of these organizations to move to a fully open
access model.

~~~
joelthelion
>their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the
field

Their primary goal is securing a nice remuneration for the members of their
board.

I've been in this field for a long time and I want to see these organizations
disappear. We don't need them (anymore).

~~~
jrochkind1
Those on the IEEE board get paid? That surprises me, although I could believe
it -- do you have a cite?

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tylerneylon
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'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.

Some people are working on solutions, but it's not obvious what that solution
will ultimately look like. There is some trial and error happening, and I hope
great progress is made while the problem has the attention of the community.

~~~
anonymouz
"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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rumberg
Off-topic: I updated the sites' design to make it more readable:
<http://cl.ly/image/3l3M0E320S3m>

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rayiner
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.

~~~
clicks
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 software movement. This is the purpose
of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software
movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise
from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a
non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant
representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of
that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies,
everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs.

The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in
the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize
everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the
world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been
digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to
everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one
body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay?

If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed
everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button
press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than
the poorest person could afford to pay? It’s a difficult moral problem,
explaining why you are excluding people from that which you yourself value
highly and could provide to them for nothing.

The best way of solving this moral problem is not to acknowledge its
existence, which is the current theory. The current theory in force takes the
view that industrial society lived in a world of non-zero marginal cost for
information – information and the ability to learn had to be embedded in
analog things: books, recordings, objects that cost non-zero amounts of money
to make, move, and sell. Therefore, it was inevitable that representations of
things we value would have significant marginal costs. And in economies
operating efficiently and competitively, – or for that matter, efficiently and
non-competitively – there would still be some cost that somebody has to pay at
the other end to receive each copy of something of meaning or value, unless
there is somebody available to provide a subsidy. And since that was the 20th
century reality, it was appropriate to have moral theory which regarded
exclusion as an inevitable necessity.

The discussion, of course, was about scale. “Ought we to find ways to
subsidize more knowledge for more people?”, and the United States became not
merely the wealthiest and most powerful country, after the second world war,
not merely the indispensable or inevitable country, it became the
intellectually most attractive country because it heavily subsidized the
availability of sophisticated knowledge to people who could make use of it,
even people who came elsewhere from poorer societies, or who had not the money
to pay. And after the second world war, in the G.I. Bill, the United States
took a unique approach to the age-old problem of how to reduce social disorder
after war time through the demobilization of a large number of young men
trained to the efficient use of collective violence – a thing which is always
worrisome to societies, and which typically produces repression movements
post-war, as the society as a whole tries to get back its leverage over those
young men – the G.I. Bill was a radical, and indeed productive approach to the
problem, namely send everybody to as much education as they want to have, at
the expense of the state which is grateful to them for risking their lives in
its defense. A splendid system; on the basis of that, and the provision of
tertiary and quaternary education to the talented elite of the world, the
United Stated government built a special place for its society in the world,
as throwing away fewer brains than its power and importance would otherwise
have tended to indicate it would do.

But we are no longer talking about whether we can save people, identified as
the elite of other societies, from the ignorance to which they might otherwise
fall prey, through enlightened federal spending. We are talking about
eliminating ignorance. We’re talking about addressing the great deprivation of
knowledge of everything of use and utility and beauty from everybody, by
building out the network across humanity, and allowing everybody to have the
knowledge and the culture that they wish to obtain. And we’re talking about
doing that because the alternative to doing that is the persistence of an
immoral condition._

Please watch to see how he continues :)

~~~
rayiner
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 respects that some people don't
want to "share" so it shares amongst itself. RMS didn't copy the source code
of some commercial compiler and "free it." He wrote his own. Miguel de Icaza
didn't copy the source of CDE and put it on Pirate Bay and "free it." He
started GNOME and wrote his own desktop.

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.

~~~
clicks
> 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
progress further as a whole. A physical good (like food) is not reproducible
at an effective zero marginal cost -- digital data is. So, when you in fact
_can_ provide everyone this resource, and work to achieve a world with true
equal opportunity at least in this one aspect (of knowledge) at a practically
zero or near-zero cost, you are indeed _morally obliged to_ distribute this
good to everyone who will prosper from it. As it stands, _culture_ is no
longer free -- to be able to participate you must pay. The more you are able
to pay, the more cultured you can be. Books, movies, music -- you can have
only as much culture, knowledge as you can pay. Why... when it's finally
gotten so much easier to afford everyone culture and information for free, or
near-free costs.

~~~
rayiner
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 for free but for their low
marginal cost, to anyone who will prosper from it? If the answer is no, how do
you justify the distinction? The producer is in no different a position if he
is obligated to provide something with $0 marginal cost for $0 than if he is
obligated to provide something with $3 marginal cost for $3. There is no
mathematical discontinuity as the marginal cost approaches $0, as long as the
producer is compensated for whatever the marginal cost happens to be.

~~~
clicks
> 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 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.

You have a network in which it is so convenient to share that it's almost
begging you to. There's a lot of fundamental rethinking of commerce here, and
I was quite bugged by it all when I started looking into it myself. But when
you see how badly the bigger half of people in this world are suffering it's
easier to see why this is necessary.

You're going to get a much better explanation of things from Moglen himself
than me -- here, the transcript to the video I linked (if you're unable to
watch the video):
[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Software:_Paradi...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Software:_Paradigm_for_a_New_Intellectual_Commons)

~~~
rayiner
> 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.

Right, that's why I said "not for free but for their low marginal cost."
You're hand-waving with the "zero marginal cost" argument without addressing
my counter-point. 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?

~~~
clicks
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. :)

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
czr80
I think the real difference here is not so much that the marginal cost of
digital goods is low, but that customers also own the means of reproduction.
That is the fundamental difference that leads to arguments over rights, and
then to arguments over morals, as these things often do.

