[Taxacom] google, copyright and micropayment

[Dean Pentcheff]

I completely agree with Donat here -- there's a real danger if
scientific publications go down this route. Micropayment systems will
be appealing to publishers, since it's a straightforward extension of
their current (and beleaguered) pay-for-access model.

Requiring a micropayment to access a scientific publication for
purposes of indexing its contents would mean that only large
commercial outfits could afford to cut the deals for indexing. Instead
of the growth of a whole scientific ecosystem of content indexing and
repurposing by many people, we'd be stuck with a system similar to
what exists now: one-size-fits-all indexing of scientific publications
solely by major database corporations.

The situation in science is not the same as in journalism. We (the
citizens) have already paid, and paid dearly, for the research. We
(scientists and other citizens) should therefore be in a position to
access the results openly, at no further charge. In journalism, no one
has paid for the work until it is delivered. In that case,
micropayment schemes make a lot more sense.

Donat is right. We'll need to keep that distinction clear as
publishers try to apply newspaper logic to scientific publishing.

-Dean
-- 
Dean Pentcheff
pentcheff at gmail.com

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:36 AM, Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org> wrote:
> Google Plans Tools to Help News Media Charge for Content
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/google-plans-tools-to-help-news-med
> ia-charge-for-content/?scp=5
> <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/google-plans-tools-to-help-news-me
> dia-charge-for-content/?scp=5&sq=google&st=cse> &sq=google&st=cse
>
> This is a new proposal from google that sounds reasonable for those who want
> or have  to sell a product, like the newspapers, where the targeted use is
> reading one page after the other.
>
> However, what that could mean for us is that the real chance of the
> Internet, having the machine do a lot of the work by mining and extracting
> information from open access journals and databases will be gone.
>
> This seems to me an other urgent call to really assure that all our
> publications are open access, that is that we do not publish in journals
> that do not allow open access.
>
> Donat
>
> Dr. Donat Agosti
> President
> Plazi
> Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Naturmuseum der
> Burgergemeinde Bern
> Email: agosti at amnh.org
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> http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/
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>
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