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

[espositoj@att.net]

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

> Of great interest to readers of this list...
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> New York Times: New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online
> 
> December 17, 2002
> By AMY HARMON 
> 
> A group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to the
> leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the progress of
> science by restricting online access to their articles so they can reap
> higher profits.
> 
> Supported by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore
> Foundation, the scientists say that this week they will announce the
> creation of two peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine,
> with the goal of cornering the best scientific papers and immediately
> depositing them in the public domain.
> 
> By providing a highly visible alternative to what they view as an outmoded
> system of distributing information, the founders hope science itself will
> be transformed. The two journals are the first of what they envision as a

> vast electronic library in which no one has to pay dues or seek permission
> to read, copy or use the collective product of the world's academic
> research.
> 
> "The written record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold E.
> Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine who is serving as the chairman of the
> new nonprofit publisher. "Our ability to build on the old to discover the
> new is all based on the way we disseminate our results."

[SNIP]