[GOAL] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke

[Andrew A. Adams]

Erice Van de Velde wrote:
> In my mind, the explicit and the non-explicit versions are all
> equivalent, and all equally irrelevant, as they are just different
> levels of name calling. I am not aware of anyone making the explicit
> Hitler argument when it comes to open access. In fact, even my shrill
> version of the argument was a non-explicit version.
> I thought I was clear about this in the post, but just restating it to
> be absolutely clear.

I don't think we need Hitler's to exist in order to say that en masse the 
role of scientific publishers has become a net negative for scholarly work, 
but is so entrenched and there are far too many "collaborators" amongst 
particularly senior academics and managers of academic institutions 
(sometimes the same group, or the latter drawn from the same group but not 
always). However, at the risk of sounding shrill and falling afoul of 
Godwin's Law, I do think that the "banality of evil" applies here. The 
current commercial publishers, many of them multi-media conglomerates who 
have gobbled up the smaller companies who were quietly making modest profits 
and working with the academic community in a way much more similar to the 
scholarly societies than the large commercial publishers (*), have taken the 
existing agreement on things like copyright transfer rather than license to 
publsh and gone beyond the unwritten bargain and started applying the letter 
of the copyright law by doing things like requiring written permission before 
allowing re-use of a diagram (even by the author and creator) and by charging 
ridiculous sums per article - more than many books, the standard price 
usually being about $30-40 per article, delivered electronically. All this 
while the technology has allowed them to cut costs substantially (and to 
transfer some of the lowered costs onto authors who now do large parts of the 
typesetting themselves). They do this while now restricting access from what 
it could be. Their motives are immaterial, the result is evil.


(*) largely run by and employing people who cared about the content of what 
they were publishing rather than simply seeing it as one more cash cow


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/