I tilknytning til siste interessante meldingen fra jon ivar er også denne
vesentlig. Restene av "forskningens frihet" (hvor formell den så enn kan
sies å ha vært før) er under sterke angrep: dvs. siste fase i vitenskapens
underlegging under kommersielle interesser fullbyrdes nå. Vitenskapsutøvere
blir slaver for de multinasjonale. Den tankefrihet det er blitt drømt om i
århundrer gravlegges med triumfskrik og fremmedgjort tale om "humankapital"
osv. "Humankapitalen" er reelt "tenkning" lagt i pengenes lenker. Norske
medier enser knapt at mannen som avslørte Israels atomare krigsplaner blir
æresdoktor i Tromsø, mens han fortsatt ikke er på fri fot.
Den besungne "fri tilgangen til forskningsresultater på nettet" er nå
angrepsmålet for profittmakerne, som allerede velter seg i patenter på
nye organismer osv. "Frihet er slaveri" (1984).
Karsten Johansen
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,496855,00.html
Science world in revolt at power of the journal owners
James Meek, science correspondent Saturday May 26, 2001 The Guardian
Scientists around the world are in revolt against moves by a powerful group
of private corporations to lock decades of publicly funded western
scientific research into expensive, subscription-only electronic databases.
At stake in the dispute is nothing less than control over the fruits of
scientific discovery - millions of pages of scientific information which may
hold the secrets of a cure for Aids, cheap space travel or the workings of
the human mind.
More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161
countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who
refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six
months.
"Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain,"
said Michael Ashburner, professor of biology at Cambridge University and one
of the leading British signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of
Science (PLS). "In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits
of science shouldn't be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge
profits. The fruits of our research - which is, overwhelmingly, publicly
paid for - should be made available as widely and as economically as
possible."
Anger has been simmering for more than a decade in the research libraries of
Europe and the US at the massive increase in the cost of subscriptions to
scientific journals, which collectively make up the sum of the world's
scientific research.
As the power of the internet to mine electronically archived journals for
data grows, scientists have become increasingly frustrated at the journal
publishers' plans to keep tight, lucrative control over decades of their work.
Last year the most powerful journal publisher, the Anglo-Dutch firm Reed
Elsevier, made a profit of £252m on a turnover of £693m in its science and
medical business.
Elsevier Science and other journal publishers effectively benefit from the
public purse twice: once when taxpayer-funded scientists submit their work
to the journals for free, and again when taxpayer-funded libraries buy the
information back from them in the form of subscriptions.
In Britain, the government is so concerned about the power of Reed Elsevier
that it has blocked its £3.2bn takeover of another big journal publisher,
Harcourt, while complaints about its market dominance are investigated.
Derk Haank, the head of Elsevier Science, protested at the singling out of
his company, and portrayed the boycott group as naive idealists. "Everybody
would like to have everything available, all the time, and preferably for
free," he said. "That's a general human trait, but I'm not sure the business
model is realistic. I'm not ashamed to make a profit. I would only be
ashamed if people were saying I was delivering a lousy service."
He added: "Research is publicly funded, but the cost of publishing it isn't.
If the funding authorities were to decide to pay for publication I would
provide it for free."
You won't find copies of most of Reed Elsevier's 1,100 journals on
newsagents' shelves. With titles like Thin Walled Structures, Urban Water,
Journal of Supercritical Fluids and Trends in Parasitology, their
publications don't have the allure of Elle or FHM but the price of a year's
subscription would make mass market publishers drool with envy.
A year's subscription to Alcohol - nine issues - comes in at about £100 an
issue. One Elsevier journal, Brain Research, costs more than £9,000 a year.
Another, Preventative Veterinary Medicine, is now £713 a year, an increase
of more than 300% over its 1991 price of £171.
Elsevier justifies the increases on the grounds that the number of articles
being submitted increases each year, adding to the firm's costs. Each
article must be peer-reviewed by fellow scientists to see if it is worthy of
publication.
Mr Haank added that his firm's price increases forced libraries to cut
subscriptions, which in turn cut Elsevier's income, forcing them to increase
prices still more.
Elsevier wanted to get out of this vicious circle, he said, and was trying
to get universities to sign up for electronically archived versions of its
journals. The firm has taken on 1,500 people to put its entire journal
archive - going back to 19th century editions of The Lancet - on computer
databases. But he said the price of subscription to the electronic database
would still be tightly linked to the ever rising cost of the paper journals.
"Our plan is to make everything available in the academic or professional
environment, not just in six months, but on day one," he said. "Somebody has
to pay for the cost of the system."
Scientific research is not considered real unless it has been published in a
recognised journal, and scientists' status and promotion is tied to
publication.
As a rule, neither the scientists who write the papers, nor their colleagues
who peer review them, nor the editorial boards who vet them, are paid. The
publishers' costs are printing, the tiny full-time staff on each journal -
typically two people - marketing, and distribution.
While the feud over the price of journals was between libraries and
publishers, the scientists stood aside, but the advent of the internet has
changed everything.
Powerful search engines trawling computer databases make it possible for
scientists to discover groundbreaking links between different research
results which would previously have taken years of trawling through a jungle
of indexes.
The prospect of this incredible new tool being controlled by large private
corporations has jerked scientists into action.
"The major commercial publishers have every reason to feel threatened," Prof
Ashburner said. "They charge very high prices, and they are very insistent
on copyright transfer. We are not paid for publication, and we see no reason
whatsoever why we should hand over copyright to a commercial publisher,
having done the work, both the science and the writing.
"The costs these publishers are charg ing are such that even in the wealthy
countries we can't always afford to buy the information back, and it's
off-limits totally for the developing world."
In a letter to the competition commission in March, Clive Field, librarian
at Birmingham University and head of the Consortium of University Research
Libraries said that the Elsevier-Harcourt merger would give one company
control over journals representing 42% of a typical university's spend in
that area.
He said Elsevier and Harcourt were already trying to drive too tough a deal
with their electronic archive. "Neither publisher has yet offered a deal
which is recognised to be fair and equitable," he wrote. "It is not
unnaturally feared that a merged publisher, operating in a market where the
buyer is weak, would be even less subject to the price checks and balances
that a more open market would offer."
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