Erice Van de Velde wrote: > In my mind, the explicit and the non-explicit versions are all > equivalent, and all equally irrelevant, as they are just different > levels of name calling. I am not aware of anyone making the explicit > Hitler argument when it comes to open access. In fact, even my shrill > version of the argument was a non-explicit version. > I thought I was clear about this in the post, but just restating it to > be absolutely clear.
I don't think we need Hitler's to exist in order to say that en masse the role of scientific publishers has become a net negative for scholarly work, but is so entrenched and there are far too many "collaborators" amongst particularly senior academics and managers of academic institutions (sometimes the same group, or the latter drawn from the same group but not always). However, at the risk of sounding shrill and falling afoul of Godwin's Law, I do think that the "banality of evil" applies here. The current commercial publishers, many of them multi-media conglomerates who have gobbled up the smaller companies who were quietly making modest profits and working with the academic community in a way much more similar to the scholarly societies than the large commercial publishers (*), have taken the existing agreement on things like copyright transfer rather than license to publsh and gone beyond the unwritten bargain and started applying the letter of the copyright law by doing things like requiring written permission before allowing re-use of a diagram (even by the author and creator) and by charging ridiculous sums per article - more than many books, the standard price usually being about $30-40 per article, delivered electronically. All this while the technology has allowed them to cut costs substantially (and to transfer some of the lowered costs onto authors who now do large parts of the typesetting themselves). They do this while now restricting access from what it could be. Their motives are immaterial, the result is evil. (*) largely run by and employing people who cared about the content of what they were publishing rather than simply seeing it as one more cash cow -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
