US Research Open Access In Peril 237
luceth writes "Several years ago, the U.S. National Institutes of Health instituted a policy whereby publications whose research was supported by federal funds were to be made freely accessible a year after publication. The rationale was that the public paid for the research in the first place. This policy is now threatened by legislation introduced by, you guessed it, a Congresswoman who is the largest recipient of campaign contributions from the scientific publishing industry. The full text of the bill, H.R. 3699, is available online."
US Research Open Access only in Perl (Score:2, Funny)
I read that as: US Research Open Access only in Perl
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Whoosh stupid mod, perl and write only are almost always synonymous....
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The usual grant applications would be more readable in Perl, so maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing.
dufus decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4)
FUCK ALL THESE GREEDY BASTARDS. Everywhere you turn there is anticonsumerism. It's just an extension of the copyright wars. What can we withhold for money? If "information wants to be free", what is taking so long? Why don't we squash power grabs when we see them happening? Why don't we have the clout to do it or the will to try?
Sickening.
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FUCK ALL THESE GREEDY BASTARDS.
Sorry mate, I'm not that kinky.
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(what the hell? /. replies with "Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.". So that I need to post something else to dilute the caps)
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Interesting)
Greed is what inspired the US to be great.
Moderating that greed is what actually makes us great.
We need greed, as sad as that is.
Re:dufus decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
I might agree with that. The problem would then be that we've dropped the moderation.
Liberate Science! (Score:5, Informative)
Some would say liberty made the US great.
In natural justice (tm) or basic apolitical logic of the situation, liberating published science is not a crime. Hoarding it and charging a toll like a bridge troll ought to be.
It's a good thing natural justice trumps US "law".
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Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Funny)
Well, Elsevier is a Dutch company, and the Netherlands has a GINI quotient of 0.650 against the USA's 0.801. Which reminds me of what my old Bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. He said, "Kid, nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's socialism for *me*, capitalism for *you*."
Anyhow, to be fair, Rep. Maloney was only helping out a constituent [1].
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1: constituent: n. A person, firm or other entity which pays for or hires the services of an elected official.
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
While many bitch that Obama is a socialist/marxist (even though nobody in this country can describe what these are) it seems these people are hell bent on creating a Soviet Russia of sorts.
Rather than trying to comprehensively define subjective and inherently nebulous terms, I prefer to keep it simple. Obama is a statist.
Unlike myself or the Founding Fathers, he does not view government as a necessary evil that's only a little better than having no government, nor does he view it as a deserving object of mistrust. He doesn't want legitimate matters of governance to be handled by the smallest and most local level of government that is able to manage them. He likes centralization for its own sake and accepts the regimentation that comes with it. He subscribes to the belief that people should be commanded and controlled rather than reasoned with, that they should not only tolerate this but also welcome it.
He may claim to be a Christian, a few may believe he is actually a Muslim, but his true religion is Statism. A lust for power is part of this religion, but only part. It's not quite that simple. It also involves a genuinely-held belief that people are unable to manage their own affairs, that they need and should desire for their "betters" to decide what is good for them and what should be important to them, that only the collective matters, that individual life and individual thought and individual liberty are meaningless. It's a form of dehumanization in favor of institutionalization.
If you understand what this really is, then you see why baser things like greed or desire for power are naive oversimplifications. Believe it or not, these people are not stupid. They know their policies cause more problems than they solve. They are not merely ignorant or misguided. People like Obama and most of Congress believe they are working towards some kind of greater good, that the damage they knowingly do to society will somehow be worth it when their utopia (really a dystopia) is finalized. The label "Marxist" is a feeble attempt to describe this quality.
Other than a few rare exceptions, this does not merely describe Obama. It also describes nearly anyone capable of acquiring the funding and the political backing it takes to win a federal election. It's sort of like an elite club and anyone who would seriously change things or otherwise rock the boat isn't invited. During the history of this nation, what we have changed from the statesman to the politician to the career politician to the ruling class with an extremely high incumbency rate. Average Joes don't stand a chance of winning a federal election. Candidates don't emerge; they are groomed.
Like they said on Monty Python's Life of Brian, "blessed are those with a vested interest in the status quo."
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Informative)
Unlike myself or the Founding Fathers, he does not view government as a necessary evil that's only a little better than having no government,
And, of course, unlike that most-definitely-not-a-Founding-Father-no-way Alexander Hamilton, who made that most-definitely-not-Founding-Fatherish statement that
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Hey - guess what? Alexander Hamilton lived in the US at a time when OTHER COUNTRIES had great private wealth. Today, the US is a country with great private wealth.
And how exactly is that relevant to a response to a posting questioning whether all the Founding Fathers, who, err, umm, "lived in the US at a time when OTHER COUNTRIES had great private wealth", were fans of minimal government?
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
You've asserted an interesting collection of terrible motives to the president with no supporting evidence. But, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and now we know yours.
Re:dufus decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
Other than a few rare exceptions, this does not merely describe Obama. It also describes nearly anyone capable of acquiring the funding and the political backing it takes to win a federal election.
What I find so strange is that so many people make this very argument, yet they still go out and vote for the same standard statist candidate. For example probably most tea partiers will vote for the republican nominee and most in the occupy movement will vote for Obama (even though he is the biggest recepient of Wall Street money and all his economic people are closely tied to Wall Street). If one really believes that the mainstream candidates are the same, then one realizes that it is much better to "waste" one's vote on an independent/smaller candidate. And if enough people do this then there will be real change.
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4)
All of the candidates are exactly the same on any issue that really matters. They may dangle some shiny differences in front of you to distract you from the fact, but that's all it is, misdirection. They want you to focus on the .5% of issues where they differ, and not the 99.5% of issues where they are identical.
Take, for example, the biggest difference between the two parties during this presidency. That is on health care. If you look at it objectively, it's obvious that both the Democrats and the Republicans had the same goal. Maximizing profits for corporations, if perhaps a slightly different set of corporations. Nobody who thinks that corporate profits should not be our first priority ever gets a seat at the table.
Get rid of your two-party system, then! (Score:3)
Well, looking from the outside, there's a possible solution:
Form a political party which pledges to do only one thing: reform the constitution to allow for proportional representation voting (multi-party system [wikipedia.org]), and then immediately have elections again.
It's the *only* way,
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Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
Times change. Before telecommunications/airplanes breaking things down to the lowest level made sense on an efficiency grounds: a large amount of resources had to be spent to move things around/get decisions from the central government to Nevada by buggy. That isn't the problem anymore. I'm not saying central govenment is always efficient but it can be. Some things make sense on a country wide basis: education standards, labor law, criminal law etc. People have a fundamental right to these services/consistency of expectations of what they can and can't do and they shouldn't be different from one area to another because the local county voted on spending the money on a new water fountain in front of town hall or the mayor happens to be religion X and is opposed to evolution on personal grounds so says that the vast majority of scientists opinions shouldn't be heard in science class.
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the country supposed to remain exactly the same even if a large part of the population no longer agrees with a 55 guys that have been dead for nearly 200 years and chief complaint was the accessibility of horse and buggy parking in front of the local dry goods store?
What is this kind of asinine hyperbole supposed to signify? Oh, that we're backwards because our Constitution is outdated and doesn't recognize your right to health care, filet mignot, and a new smart phone every year? Since you seem to have forgotten what the grievances were that prompted people to go to war to oust their leaders from power, I'll remind you:
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Sorry a lot of that is irrelevant/already solved by technology. The vast majority of this is griping about no representation non-elected rulers. Essentially marshal law of a people with no say in how the country is governed etc. Last time I checked the US doesn't have a monarch (though only having two parties with any chance of power is pretty damn close IMHO). ex. judges "dependent on his Will alone" nope you don't have that. At least except for the supreme court (and than only the members unfortunate to
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I have lots of proof that pi is actually equal to three. I just don't have time to show you.
Re:dufus decisions (Score:4, Informative)
While many bitch that Obama is a socialist/marxist (even though nobody in this country can describe what these are)
Marxism is an economic system where all means of production become common property (owned and controlled by the state), and private profit is disallowed. Socialism (according to Marx) is a transitional phase between capitalism and Marxism.
The current US economic system is more closely related to fascism, and has been for decades, accelerated under the current and previous administrations. That's an extremely unpopular label, but Musollini-style fascism - with close ties between the government and corporations, with each interdependent on the other - is the most accurate description of the current system. Typically euphemisms such as "public/private partnerships" or "privatizing" are used instead, but it's the same principle.
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Oh god, where to begin.
Firstly, Marxism by itself is strictly a theoretical school, Marx used it to conclude things was fucked and to devise a solution which was the communist manifsto(the ideology).
The main point of communism was the absolution of the state, when workers could organize the manufacturing and distribution of goods without one group/actors gaining leverage over the other(the point of the classless society).
Amiable goal but the means to reach it the way Marxism foresaw was just plain wrong.
Sa
Congresspeople doing favors for donors (Score:5, Insightful)
Color me shocked.
This will never change until lobbying and donations on a corporate scale are either severely limited or outright made illegal and enforced with harsh punishment. However, since it would be Congress that would need to change those laws, it's never going to happen.
Who watches the watchers, fox guard the henhouse, etc.
Re:Congresspeople doing favors for donors (Score:5, Insightful)
This will never change until lobbying and donations on a corporate scale are either severely limited or outright made illegal and enforced with harsh punishment.
Thank all the gods that the Supreme Court figured out that campaign contributions don't "necessarily" buy politicians. Otherwise we might be tempted to jump to an uncharitable conclusion, in cases like this.
Re:Congresspeople doing favors for donors (Score:5, Interesting)
If we outlaw corporate contributions to candidates, we must also outlaw:
The only source of campaign contributions should be registered voters, and capped. Corporations are not registered voters. Neither are unions, PACs, non-citizen immigrants (legal or otherwise), minors, felons (sorry, Wall Street, sorry, Earth First), or anything else. If you can't vote, why should you be allowed any other influence? That is a privilege reserved for citizens... it is what citizenship is all about. Yeah, sure, that means a whole lot less money floating around for propaganda, but is that bad? Why would replacing glitzy attack TV ads (expensive) with written position statements (cheap) be undesirable? And if someone isn't sufficiently motivated to open their wallets to support their candidates, fuck 'em. The lazy and apathetic will do what the motivated damned well tell them to (I'm looking at YOU, moderates, you lazy couch-dwelling motherfuckers. The national party committees, ALL of them, are owned by Constitution-hating would-be dictators because extremists are the only ones who give a damn enough to do anything other than whine, and the national committees are not about philosophy... they're about money.).
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The only source of campaign contributions should be registered voters, and capped.
I agree, except that I would let parents contribute on behalf of their children.
Re:Congresspeople doing favors for donors (Score:5, Insightful)
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It would sting the corporations a lot more than it stings me. As it stands now, I can't buy laws, but they can. If it was all illegalized, neither of us could.
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Norway (where I'm from) deals with it by forbidding political TV advertising (and possibly radio advertising - I'm not sure), and as far as I remember giving a certain amount of funding to political parties if they reach the election threshold (sperregrensen) - in Norway, 4% of the vote (and the election threshold only applies to levelling seats).
This works well; I've never met anybody that considers the system to not work. They will disagree with some politicians, but not with the entire system.
Eivind.
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Interesting. I also like the check-off option in state and federal tax returns - although I'd prefer equal distribution out of that pool to all qualifying candidates.
Small but real correction: generally, felons who've satisfied their incarceration/probation debt have most of their rights re-instated, including the franchise.
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yea I never figured it out
If I attempt to bribe a congressperson I go to prison
Obligatory but apt: (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org]
The feds can't mandate openness, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The feds can't mandate openness, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, no.
Note that the publisher has a veto on it as well, if it's published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Re:The feds can't mandate openness, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Private institutions may, indeed, do as they please.
Of course, if the publishers decide (after buying a law preventing the government from mandating openness) to say "we won't publish your paper if YOU mandate openness either", then, as a scientist, you're pretty much screwed.
I don't have a problem with "the author gets to decide" (though I think if my taxes are paying for it, it should be open unless there's a good reason otherwise).
I DO have a problem with "the Publisher gets to decide, which is what t
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I DO have a problem with "the Publisher gets to decide, which is what this is doing...
Unfortunately, the publisher holding the copyright/controlling dissemination is the status quo. As I see it, change is only going to come from within, with researchers and institutions turning up the heat on publishers or starting their own open publications. Some of these changes are happening, with some schools and disciplines shifting towards open access policies. However, based on the current bill and the SOPA fiasco, I don't think legislators can be counted on to do the right thing when it comes to
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If the system had not been so significantly corrupted through past legislation similar to this, any funding coming from the government(public money) would immediately make any work resulting therefrom public-sector work.
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Perhaps, but journals are well-known for either being pressured (or sometimes believing themselves pressured) to publish only what their sponsors want published and in the manner the sponsors want it published in. That means that hypothetical abilities to waive restrictions may not actually exist in practice. The only way you can guarantee such freedoms is if the Feds intervene at least to the point of prohibiting abuse of position.
However, it's extremely safe to say that if the Feds are themselves being wh
Name and party affiliation (Score:4, Informative)
Use: Rep Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) instead of "a congresswoman"
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Well, since all politicians succumb to bribes, the name doesn't really help. The only political party on the planet is "Money Pot", so the shell entity created to represent it doesn't make any difference, and location only makes a difference if politicians care about the people in it (and you can guess my opinion on that score).
Re:Name and party affiliation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Name and party affiliation (Score:5, Informative)
H.R. 3699 was introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Committee member Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)
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Good that you brought it up. Also note that Issa got money from the same group that gave Maloney hers.
Ron Paul isn't my first choice for a candidate, but right now he's the only one guaranteed to shake things up enough for real change.
Re:Name and party affiliation (Score:5, Insightful)
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They are scum, and it's a tragedy the aircraft which hit the Pentagon didn't drill Congress instead.
Al Qaeda would have done the Great Satan a Great Favor.
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Kind of makes one wonder about the praise Issa was getting earlier when the story broke about him calling a SOPA hearing with (tiny) tech "leaders"
Re:Name and party affiliation (Score:5, Informative)
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Are those details really relevant? The vice of corruption is something I expect of nearly all Congressmen regardless of party or home state.
The academic publishing scam (Score:5, Informative)
There was an interesting article [guardian.co.uk] on the academic publishing industry recently. When you get all the material refereed for free (actually, on the dime of the colleges and research institutes who pay the reviewer's salary), there's just no reason why the charges should be soaring up past $20 per article like they have in the last 10 years.
The greed doesn't stop there either. Not long ago I was a volunteer at a fairly prominent IEEE conference. The cost of attendance per person is in the $600-$1000 range. Despite contributing 12+ hours of work, one of the co-chairs had to fight with the organizers just to get them to foot the bill for our lunches.
Re:The academic publishing scam (Score:5, Informative)
The publisher got all the material for free?! No! Even worse! Scientists MUST pay when their article gets accepted. Reviewers work on a volunteer basis, NO payment whatsoever. The publisher often does NOTHING to article other than checking formatting issue. Often times, scientists themselves have to fix formatting issues. The review process is usually organized by a volunteer chief editor. The chief editor then decides what to publish. Publishers did ZERO on the science part and almost zero on the formatting part. After then, the publisher CHARGES libraries or individual readers for the electronic copies for which it does ALMOST NOTHING!
Re:The academic publishing scam (Score:4, Interesting)
I like the definitions section on this one... (Score:5, Informative)
With this definition, they've basically declared all work not done by Federal Employees "Private sector", even if paid for entirely by the Federal Government, so long as the work is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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Why are bribes even legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You assume there's some way to prevent this.
Or are you just assuming that featuring your favorite (or least favorite) politician in a news article doesn't count as a contribution in kind?
Getting all money out of politics (except the news) would just mean
It's easy (Score:3)
As for tracking the money, how easy would it be to spot a candidate who has 10
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Except for the penalties, all of the above are true in Canada:
- no corporate donations at all
- no donations from foreigners
- max donation of $1100 per person to a party
And our government is still in the pocket of the big media corporations.
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So, how do you deal with CBS giving favourable press to a candidate who just happe
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Then make the punishment commensurate with the crime of attempting to subvert the government of the United States. I'm typically not a death penalty supporter, but I'd go with both the individual death penalty and the corporate death penalty violations of campaign finance laws, for both the donor and the recipient. Kill the briber and the person who was bribed. If it's a corporate "donation," kill all the board members, too. Dissolve the corporation and sell its assets.
You'd only have to carry out tha
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The death penalty, especially against nonviolent people, is barbaric. It would be quite sufficient to sentence the briber and recipient to, say, 30 years behind bars. And there is no need for corporate dissolution (which punishes a lot of innocent bystanders). Just lock away the current executives, and promote or hire some people to fill their roles. I'm confident the new management would not make the old management's mistake.
Re:Why are bribes even legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are bribes even legal?
Because the people accepting the bribes are the people deciding what is and is not legal.
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Making it illegal to accept outside money isn't enough, since a popular way to bribe politicians right now is to offer them high paying jobs for when they retire.
We need to not only ban outside money, but also require politicians to sign non-competes (sad as that is), banning them from working in any private sector job for a period of time dependent on what their role in the government was (e.g. 2 years for cabinet members and the like, 4 years for a representative, 6 for a senator, life for a president).
Stupid yet honest (Score:2)
TFA quotes the text of the bill as consisting of the following 3 lines:
"No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that:
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-secto
Oh, this should be good.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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/. nitpick:
the word you are looking for is "founders" not "flounders"
(dict.org)
:
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Founder \Found"er\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Foundered; p. pr. &
vb. n. Foundering.] [OF. fondrer to fall in, cf. F.
s'effondrer, fr. fond bottom, L. fundus. See Found to
establish.]
1. (Naut.) To become fill
I might be wrong here but (Score:2)
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The bill specifically states that any research done by a private organization is covered even if all of the funding for the research comes from federal funds.
3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term `private-sector research work' means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
This is just a blatant attempt to misappropriate public funds for the sake of commercial interests.
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The comment thread on the article goes into this in detail. It seems to amount to careful parsing on the part of the Elsevier rep who authored the bill.
Obligatory car analogy: if your car has a "For Sale" sign on it, and I come by with a bucket of water and wash it, does that give me the right to dictate who gets your car?
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No, but if I buy the parts and pay you to put the car together, I think I should be able to say who gets the car when you're done.
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In this bill "private-sector" doesn't mean private sector. It redefines "private-sector research" to be work funded by the government performed by anyone except the federal government so long as it is edited or peer reviewed by a non-governmental organization. So someone at the University of Illinois doing NASA funded research who sends something to the University of Chicago Press for publication cannot be required by NASA make copies available at a eprint server at no charge. If you want to see the res
Tell your congress critter - POPVOX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tell your congress critter - POPVOX (Score:4, Insightful)
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Open Season (Score:2)
I, for one, vote that we just start executing any politician who - without first consulting their constituents or evaluating the public good of a measure - does something solely to benefit their donors.
We can call it 'Rehabilitation' and make it like a death carnival during a monster truck show...
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Do 'em like China did with the folks who contaminated infant formula.
Named, shamed, then shot in pubic.
On the positive side, (Score:2)
we now know now much it costs to buy a congressman: $5,500 [maplight.org].
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we now know now much it costs to buy a congressman: $5,500 [maplight.org].
Replace "Democrat" with "Republican" in that URL and you'll see that Issa cost less than Maloney.
Shouldn't all work by public employees be open? (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for the government and every once in a while my boss says I should try to patent it. I always refuse because my paycheck comes from the taxpayers so it should be freely available. I have never been able to find if there is an easy way to release my designs in an open way. I don't think the lawyers want to deal with it.
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Open versus pay journals (Score:3, Informative)
Choosing to publish in a journal that is free to all has the disadvantage that it can cost quite a bit (thousands of dollars for the last one I did) to publish your work and the advantage that anyone with a computer and internet access has access to your work.
Having said that, any grant funded project likely has money marked specifically for publication (dissemination) costs (personally I think publication costs are a better investment then conference presentations but that's just me). If you know you want to have your work freely available AND you are funded by an NIH grant there's no good reason why it can't be done without publishing in a subscription based journal that's going to bitch about letting everyone see your article for free after a year.
Leave the subscription journals for the poor SOBs that don't have grant money coming in (another problem).
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If you're working in a research/academic setting, you're paying for it either way. It just comes out of different pots of money. And since the publishers are relentlessly hiking institutional subscription rates, your institutional budget for journal subscriptions is getting out of control. What's better: pay a fixed fee up front for something that you (and everyone else) will be able to read anytime, anywhere, or pay an ever-growing recurring fee for something that only people at research/academic instituti
It is my firm belief (Score:2)
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You realize othing actually happens unless the bill gets passed, right?
Sure one representative can propose something but it takes a majority or representatives voting for it to actually pass.
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Correct - however other reps want their own bills to pass, so they'll vote in favour to get it in return. Isn't that how the game works?
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Possibly. But then you get to complain to your rep if they decide to vote for it - not being able to do that was the complaint I was responding to after all.
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The second link didn't come across properly with my make-link FF extension: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf [stanford.edu]
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The Dem was the recipient of the kick back lefty.
(What's a "kick back lefty"?)
The Republican who introduced the bill was also one of the recipients of contributions from Elsevier [maplight.org]. Much less money ($2K to Issa, $11K to Maloney), but still money. There are other Democrats and other Republicans on the list as well. Dunno whether Issa's just a cheaper date or what.
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