Is this another RIAA or is it legit?

[Peter]

There is a hugely interesting article on the theme written by none other than D.
Knuth, which points out the problems, including the financial angle (you can
count on a mathematician to get that part right). It was well worth reading but
it scared me that I read it in 2010 when it was written in 2004. The reference
to the $48 per view Creative Commons licensed article is via slashdot and was
fixed then, in 2004.

The Knuth paper: 

  http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/joalet.pdf

The slashdot article about the $48 Creative Commons licensed paper scandal:

  http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/1341248

There is much more of it out there, it's just that I was not aware how prevalent
the problem is and how badly it affects me (and how it meshes with the skewed
results returned by popular search engines in this area and in others - actually
that, a botched search that cost me some money and time - got me started on this
path).

IMNSHO there should be some kind of link or reference to this problem and to its
solutions (i.e. open repositories) on just about every Open Source oriented
website, wiki or other online form. Many papers refer directly to software,
standards and algorithms and are very relevant to (F)OSS and to students and
other people who need to do scientific research of any kind on a budget. I would
like to make myself clear: this is not about politics, it is about reasonable
competition (not) regulating prices (anymore). This is one of many indexes of
open access publication related sites and indexes:

  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm

It is inconceivable that the price per page of technical publications delivered
as camera-ready copy to the publisher exceeds the price of copier use in
downtown by 5-20 times at least, knowing that a commercial copier page in ones
is about the most expensive kind of copy one can obtain commercially, and
everyone pretends to look the other way. 

As D. Knuth points out in his paper, most scientific papers reach the publisher
in camera ready form, not last thanks to TeX, and the printing house is
essentially operating one giant copier operation, subject to economies of scale
which should drop the price incredibly by comparison with the downtown copier
operation.

What the price of publication means for online copies, which cost cents per
megabyte of storage and badwidth and year, I won't even want to compute. Just
remember that the downtown copier office makes money and pays taxes on that too!

  Peter


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