Re: NYTimes.com Article: Moore Foundation funds new journals

[Eric Hellman <eric@openly.com>]

My first job out of college was at Intel in Santa Clara, designing memory
chips. Intel is notable for its cubicle culture- even Andy Grove and
Gordon Moore worked out of cubicles, albeit cubicles a bit more spacious
than most. Gordon Moore's cubicle was right next to the library, and this
was not a coincidence. The older volumes of the Physical Review (predating
the existence of Intel) were all stamped "PROPERTY OF G.E.M."

It's not about money, it's about science.

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, 
Inc.
eric@openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor 
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything


At 2:24 PM -0500 12/17/02, espositoj@att.net wrote:
>Readers of this announcement should note the source of the funding, the
>Moore Foundation.  Without wishing to get involved with the debate over
>whether research papers should be available for free, it is noteworthy
>that companies like Intel would benefit enormously from weakened
>copyright, free access to information, and various other ideas that are
>currently floating about (and floating about with good reason).  While the
>current matter concerns academic research, the end-point of the debate is
>broadband entertainment (because that's where the money is).  To take
>sides in this matter seems to me to be a lot like lining up with either
>William Jennings Bryan or J.P. Morgan on the gold standard.  It's about
>money, and high-minded notions of equal access to information (or the
>equally high-minded, if less familiar, liberatarian notion of each
>individual having a right to the product of his or her personal labor) 
>are getting caught up in a battle between networks of economic interests.
>
>This matters ultimately because the "tax" one currently pays to Reed
>Elsevier, John Wiley, etc. will in due course be replaced by a new tax, to
>be collected by Intel, Sun, Microsoft, etc.  Those who believe Linux
>solves this problem will pay their tax to bandwidth and box providers and
>to IBM and others for integrating all the pieces.  Information may want to
>be free, but the various ways of finding it, indexing it, and downloading
>it will not be.
>
>Joseph Esposito
>espositoj@att.net
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