Nature 7th July '05, Tons of MER articles!!! Options

[ktotam]

I can send pdfs of articles if anyone's interested..

[Nix]

you can?

Nico

[ktotam]

you can? :P

Nico

let's talk about it over an email..)

[hubdel11]

I can send pdfs of articles if anyone's interested..

yes yes yes

[djellison]

I'm not going to get all draconian - but technically I think it's breaching some copyright of Nature's to do so.

By all means talk about it via email ( I have - they're great ) but not here

Doug

[Of counsel]

I'm not going to get all draconian - but technically I think it's breaching some copyright of Nature's to do so.

No doubt about that one! I suspect that Nature may have already been in touch with you. Many publications take enforement very seriously.

[tty]

No doubt about that one!  I suspect that Nature may have already been in touch with you.    Many publications take enforement very seriously.

Sadly true, though trying to impede the dissemination of scientific results is a very unethical thing to do, particularily for a journal like Nature.
This is a case where I think we can "break the law" with a completely clear conscience.

tty

[mike]

The problem is that every magazine needs to make money to continue to exist. Are writers themselves reimbursed for submissions to Nature as well? If so, they would also be in trouble if everyone just copied the original articles without any reimbursement to Nature.. regardless, though, without the magazine there would be no articles.

You can say capitalism is evil if you want, but thus far no one has come up with a better way of making people actually do something. Besides, if any of the articles in Nature had revealed anything truly amazing, we'd have heard about it already.

[TheChemist]

The authors neither pay nor get paid. Publishing is in their job description

Nature earns money from subscriptions by organizations/companies/universities,
and from advertisements (in print and on the web).

We need a "science napster", I tell ya

[mike]

I suppose just being published is enough, since you can put it on your resume..

Regardless, the editing staff needs to be paid, and the distribution staff, and the publishing staff, and the marketing staff, and whatever other departments I missed..

Honestly though I do download copyrighted things (no wait, I'm joking!, sorry RIAA/MPAA/whoever else), but I always buy them eventually if they're good. When I'm rich I'll buy everything and everyone will be happy.

When it comes to the written word, though, it somehow seems more unfair to 'pirate' it. I guess I personally just have more respect for writers than musicians and directors/actors/etc (although movies are written, but screenplay writers have it easy, and oh yeah, music lyrics, which technically make no sense 99% of the time).

[dvandorn]

OK, so let's see, I write to Nature and ask to purchase a copy to read the early MER findings.

They write back, telling me I need to buy a year's subscription.

I try to buy a year's subscription, and they tell me that they are an industry-specific publication, and I must *prove* that I am in a field that requires a subscription to their magazine...

I don't know for sure that Nature would follow this policy, but I *do* know that AW&ST does. As do several other periodicals that publish results from NASA probes.

Tell me I'm doing something unethical trying to get access to something that *I have paid for* (with my taxes) when the publishers, when I offer them money, refuse on the grounds that I don't buy the products their advertisers are advertising... at that point, I say that the publishers are acting unethically and any distribution "behind their backs" is not only justified, they asked for it...

-the other Doug

[tedstryk]

er periodicals that publish results from NASA probes.

Tell me I'm doing something unethical trying to get access to something that *I have paid for* (with my taxes) when the publishers, when I offer them money, refuse on the grounds that I don't buy the products their advertisers are advertising... at that point, I say that the publishers are acting unethically and any distribution "behind their backs" is not only justified, they asked for it...

The problem is that Nature and many other journals don't get any of that funding. So someone has to pay for the production.

[djellison]

In the old days pre-internet, I could understand the need to somehow cover the costs of publishing to print, but now the costs are negligable via the internet. Going on the comparatively high per-unit-cost of bandwidth on this host - a 2mb pdf is the equiv of around 1.5p

It is about time that more was done in this mould - http://themarsjournal.org/

In this modern information age - it is totally wrong for scientific information to be hidden inside expensive journals instead of shared publicly.

Doug

[tty]

The authors neither pay nor get paid. Publishing is in their job description 

Nature earns money from subscriptions by organizations/companies/universities,
and from advertisements (in print and on the web).

We need a "science napster", I tell ya 

Actually many scientific journals now have "page charges" i e You have to pay to get published. I don't think Nature does bot I'm not sure, never having published anything in it. Nature does permit putting a PDF version of a paper freely online, but only 6 months after publication.

There are already a number of "science napsters", however it is not just a matter of publishing just anywhere. Career-wise it is unfortunately at least as important where you publish as what you publish. And on the whole Nature and Science in that order are the two most prestigious places.

tty

[TheChemist]

tty,

Page charges in the era of electronic publishing is outrageous. This was done more to keep scientists from writing lengthy papers than get profit, and it was understandable when journals were produced in print. Now it is plain stupid.

The whole revolution of electronic science publishing has just started, so I hope things will sort out. Scientific journal publishing has to completely transform in the electronic era, and I hope the scientists themselves will contribute. Printed editions are a thing of the past and unnecessary. I have not been to the library to actually read an article for 8 years now. It's a total waste of paper.

I understand Science and Nature are important, but ... this is such a huge subject that I will defer from continuing the discussion now. I have to go home