Sharing of knowledge is a basic liberty, not a private good

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“In the old days a pirate was someone who prowled the sea lanes and stole or levied the cargoes of legitimate traders. Today a new form of piracy prevails - and it applies to the thing most central to the destiny of civilisation: knowledge. This issue is highlighted in a current protest by thousands of scientists around the world against the restrictive behaviour of a leading international scientific publishing house. Essentially they object to the monopolisation of their published science by big journals, their profiteering and large fees levied and the restrictions they impose on public access to the science (see thecostofknowledge.com). At the same time a handful of corporations and IP attorneys are busy patenting discoveries made with public money, for private profit. As a recent court case in America showed, people are finding they don't even own their own genes any longer - one quarter of them have already been privately patented... The issue is that most of the world's science - over three quarters in fact - is discovered using funding from the general public, via taxes levied by national governments, with the intention of generating public benefit. This makes the public the primary owner of the science. However, it has not stopped scientific publishing houses and IP ''owners'' from asserting that they have exclusive control over this new knowledge - and everyone else must pay them to see or to use it. To test the theory, try downloading an Australian scientific paper generated with public funding from the website of a major science journal. If you are not a subscriber, you will be asked to pay $30, $50 or even more for access to science for which you have already paid with your taxes... Today, a host of middlemen - including publishers, lawyers, and the managements of universities and research institutions - are hard at work encroaching on the public's right to science and taxing its access to new knowledge. Bluntly, this is a restraint of trade. The Open Science movement represents a nascent attempt by IT and biotech scientists to resist this negative trend... Thus, knowledge vitally needed by human society to deal with disease, climate change, poverty, safety, loss of biodiversity, contamination, hunger and so on - knowledge that can save and improve billions of lives, accelerate global economic growth and enhance sustainability - is being locked up and privately exploited...”

Link:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/sharing-of-knowledge-is-a-basic-liberty-not-a-private-good-20120219-1tgw1.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.open_science oa.australia oa.costs oa.litigation oa.patents oa.fees

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:58

Date published:

02/20/2012, 15:58