Karrie Peterson, A Step Toward Tyranny, Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2002. On the Bush administration withdrawal of government publications from public accessibility.
"PubScience is a free online, searchable database that indexes and summarizes articles from more than 1,000 scientific journals that have agreed to participate. It has been helping students, researchers and ordinary citizens since October 1999. But the Department of Energy is poised to pull the plug on PubScience because the service competes with commercial products that are currently free. The operative word is "currently" because there is no guarantee that the no-cost commercial services will stay around or that they will be as comprehensive as PubScience. For years, the information industry has contended that the government should not compete with private business. If PubScience is terminated, it will no doubt demand that other government-sponsored indexes --medical, education, etc.-- be replaced by commercial ones. But let's be honest about the difference: How long will a commercial index be freely distributed to libraries and who will preserve it?"
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2002 09:03:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
