Is this another RIAA or is it legit?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Peter <plpeter2006-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| My frustration with paper searches, as well as the frustration of the Cambridge
| scientist who was asked to pay $48 to view his own Creative Commons licensed
| paper some time ago (see Slashdot)

Reference?

| has led me to discover PRISM. Good or evil?
| 
|   http://www.prismcoalition.org/topics.htm

Nothing there seems to have changed in a while.

Here's a Lessig article on an ongoing attempt to reverse the (US)
NIH's Open Access policy via legislation.  An earlier version was
mentioned on prismacoalition.org:
  http://www.lessig.org/blog/2009/03/john_conyers_and_open_access.html

| They seem to be strong advocates of selling for good money to the public what
| has been already paid for by said public in the form of taxes, which paid for
| the research, and of said government not interfering in said selling.

This is a complicated topic.  Everyone sees things differently.  Some
issues:

- the only kind of dead-tree publishing that I know still makes money is
  academic publishing.  Probably there is money in publishing text
  books (a different kind of academic publishing) and legally mandated
  documents.

- the sands are shifting under all publishers and they want to hold on
  for dear life to anything that looks like it might still work

- As I understand it, academic publishing is done by two kinds of
  entities: scholarly societies (eg. ACM, IEEE) and commercial
  publishers (eg. Elsevier, Springer, North Holland, Kluwer).

- The commercial publishers are wildly profitable and very
  consolidated.  The prices for their journals are unreasonable.

- The journals published by scholarly societies are not cheap.  At
  ACM, some of the revenue from publishing is used to subsidize other
  activities.  There is a controversy about this now, triggered by ACM
  resisting some forms of open access.  I pay something like US$100
  per year to access ACM journals online (I dropped my paper
  subscriptions a couple of years ago).

- my kids don't experience "the literature" the way I did.  They seem
  to get current things from the arXiv as far as I know.  One has a
  paper accepted by a Springer journal but still gets to put it on
  arXiv.  They do require that the arXiv version point to Springer's
  version.  Apparently university libraries still subscribe.

- peer review is still important and must be preserved.  Traditionally
  referees don't get paid but I think that editors do; there still are
  costs, but they seem minor.

- the real scarcity is of eyeballs.  I've seen claims (that I don't
  trust) that the average number of readers for a paper is less than
  two.  For that reason, I do want there to be a merit-based barrier
  to publishing in the top tier venues -- otherwise we'll be swamped.

- medical journals have different conflicts of interest.  Even more
  interesting stories there.  For example, Canadian Medical
  Association Journal blowing up and many transferring to "Open
  Medicine".
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