[LINK] What's Wrong with Copy Protection

[Tony Barry]

At 12:53 PM +1100 24/1/2001, Danny Yee wrote:
>There are more important things than Madonna at stake.  How about
>access to scientific and engineering research - say information that
>will safer bridges to be built?  Fortunately academia has a culture
>of open publication, but that's one of the things that is threatened
>by the kind of IP revolution the information hoarders want to stage.

There is considerable resistance to this. For instance, in a week 
form at JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/about/ , at an organisational 
level internationally at ICOLC 
http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/statement.html which is 
expressed locally at 
http://www.anu.edu.au/caul/datasets/icolc-oz.html , and more 
radically at the Open Archives Initiative 
http://www.openarchives.org/ .

The latter seeks to bypass commercial publishing of the scholarly 
journal literature and comes complete with a set of standards to make 
it work. The bulk of the physics literature is now effectively freely 
available via http://xxx.lanl.gov/ .

The debate in this area is voluminous. Anybody wishing to get a 
flavour of it can look at the September Forum archives at 
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html or look at 
the writings of Steven Harnad 
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/intpub.html  who spoke a week ago in 
Sydney at the Online2001 conference where I was delighted to meet him 
and hear his lucid exposition of the way forward again. Its time for 
the scholarly community to wrest control of their own work (journal 
literature only) from commercial publishers who exploit them

Tony
-- 
phone  +61 2 6241 7659
mailto:me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
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