a critique of economy of intellectual property, an introduction

it is time, as we the scientist need to acknowledge the fact that there is an economy behind our rather solipsist defined "search for reality" practice of science. Not only a whole industry of "tool building," is out there what is worse, our intellectual property gets owned by scientific journals so that they can sell subscriptions.

this discourse is motivated by a recent phdcomic.



they argue that they are providing the important service of deciding what is "cutting edge research." imagine the journals that affect you getting a job, continuing research are basically setting the "contemporary trends" in contrary to what most of the scientists think of as the science they need to pursue. i don't know what my molecular biology and biophysics friends think but my astronomer and physicist colleagues are fed up and disillusioned by the choices these highly regarded magazines make.

and get this, they are getting paid for this. be they are non-profit organizations or not.

here comes another challenger, called Public Library of Sciences. they support ideologically all articles should be publicly accessible and they publish online journals. they emerged from a very effective public relations stunt, which was triggered by a boycott of journals to make their archives public.

now they are considered to be a new business model in which they rely on scientist charges and do almost the same kind of editorial "filtering" that the high brow journals do.

i became interested in the progress of scientific publishing which not only affects but defines most of our lives. and this is a first post in this series. and i want to finish with a post from phdcomics phorum.

If I had any editorial input at The Onion, I would do an article about Nature announcing a new spin-off journal: Nature Horseshit. There'd be quotes from Nobel laureates about all the horseshit research they had that would be perfect for the journal, etc, etc.