[GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier

[Peter Murray-Rust]

Maintaining organizations against being taken over or pwned is critical. I
believe in ThomasK and PaulG, but no human is immortal. The inevitable
outcome of useful public innovation is privatization, unless formal steps
are taken to protect it. This can be done by a trusted organization (I
would trust most Scientific Unions but not most scientific societies, for
example).

The most powerful mechanism , which I would promote , is legal constraints
in the organization. One of the best known is the GPL.  In the Shuttleworth
Foundation (which funds ContentMine) we have been discussing this in depth
and we are now integrating legal tools such as OpenLock, MissionLock and
AssetLock. These are formal phrases, enforceable by courts, which prevent
certain change of direction. These tools would have prevented SSRN from
this disaster.

You can trust that ContentMine cannot be taken over by Mendeley because we
have a clause in the Articles of Association. I think arXiv and RePeC
should consider protection like this.

On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 9:04 PM, Ted Bergstrom <tedb at econ.ucsb.edu> wrote:

> Hooray for RePEc!
> Thomas, Is there a short answer to the question:
> "How do we know RePEc can't be bought?"
> Do you have any advice  to offer economists who are wary of
> the SSRN sellout?
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>   Stevan Harnad writes
>>
>> > Shame on SSRN.
>>
>>   Why? I am certainly looking forward to SSRN becoming as undynamic as
>>   Mendeley after an Elsevier takeover.
>>
>> > I don't know about Arxiv (needless centralization and its concentrated
>> > expenses are always vulnerabe to faux-benign take-overs) but what's
>> sure is
>> > that the distributed network of Green institutional repositories
>> worldwide
>> > is not for sale, and that is their strength...
>>
>>   RePEc can not be bought either. I created it before institutional
>>   repositories came along. It is based on the same principles as
>>   institutional repositories.
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>   Cheers,
>>
>>   Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>>                                               skype:thomaskrichel
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>
>
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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