Who Owns Science?

immerrath writes "The New York Times has an article [Sorry, tomorrow's article, no Google link yet] on a movement that is rapidly gaining support in the scientific community: the Public Library of Science(PLoS). The founders, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, Stanford biologist Pat Brown and Berkeley Lab scientist Michael Eisen, argue that scientific literature cannot be privately controlled or owned by the publishers of scientific journals, and must instead be available in public archives freely accessible by anyone and everyone. This has very important implications for the fundamental principle that Science must transcend all economic, national and other barriers. For a while now, PLoS has been trying to get scientific journals to release the rights to scientific papers; many major journals have not complied -- in response, PLoS is starting PLoS-standard-compliant journals (for which they received a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation), to demonstrate the validity of the idea and persuade academic publishers to adopt the free access model. They even have a GPL-like open access Licence, and their journals have some very prominent scientists on the editorial board. Here is the text of an earlier Newsweek article about PLoS, and here is a Nature Public Debate explaining the issues. Michael Eisen received the 2002 Benjamin Franklin award for his work on PLoS. Don't forget to sign the PLoS open letter!"

I'm sure . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that in soviet russia, science owns you. What a frickin' surprise.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[mph]

Everyone has access to Nature.

But if you want to subscribe, it'll set you back up to $159 a year.

I do

[cca93014]

I own it all, and i will sell it to you for one million dollars

Re:a great slipery slope

[macdaddy357]

All your science are belong to us.

-Corporate Robber Barons

Re:Standing on the shoulders of Giants

[ice cream koan]

In computer science, we stand on each other's toes.

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA was: Re:a great slipery slope

[blue trane]

freedom wants to be information

Re:obligatory soviet-russia comment

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, up shuts YOU!

Re:Enter Politics

[rodgerd]

Yeah, the capitalistic process never influences scientific research and publication, leading to Great Purity. Why, look at all that research on the harmful effects of smoking in the 1940s and 1950s. Promptly published, it immediately led to a drop off in smoking and saved millions of lives that would have been lost if scientists had buried it at the beheat of their employers.

Re:Enter Politics

[blue trane]

They should just publish everything online (cheaper) and let peers rate the articles. Sort of like slashdot moderation. Wait, maybe that's not such a good idea...

Re:Science is open to everyone

[stand]

I'd rather have Newton, Einstein and Feynman on my science bowl team than Venter, Wolfram and Ramanujan any day. ;-)