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

["John Durno" <jdurno@ola.bc.ca>]

Public domain content does not necessarily have to be hosted on publicly
owned and managed servers. It doesn't necessarily have to be a case of
either paying the "Elsevier tax" or the "IBM tax". (Never mind that the
dichotomy is somewhat artificial anyway, since it assumes that the service
provider does not pass on their technology costs to the customer).

If information vendors are able to provide high quality indexing,
search/retrieval, and hosting in a cost-effective manner, then ultimately
it shouldn't matter if the content is in the public domain, should it? I'm
sure many institutions would gladly outsource such value-added services,
rather than taking on the difficult job of managing servers, etc.

Of course, having content in the public domain would make it possible for
institutions to shop around for hosting services in a way that often isn't
possible right now, particularly at the high end. Indexing and hosting in
this model would become commodity services, not monopolies as they often
are at present. This would help to create a level playing field, and open
things up a little more to some healthy competition among service
providers. Competition is good, right?

John Durno
jdurno@ola.bc.ca


liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu writes:
>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