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ICSTI: news items
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: ICSTI: news items
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:38:21 +0100
- Organization: IUCr
---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: German Implementation of the EU Copyright Directive Date: Thursday 30 September 2004 10:55 am From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE> To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL With thanks to the STM Copyright Newsletter: German implementation – The German Ministry of Justice recently (9 September) published its plans for the so-called “second basket” of domestic copyright law reforms to complete implementation of the Copyright Directive. After sustained lobbying by German publishers and the Börsenverein, the result is looking much better for publishers than originally feared. Technical protection measures are fully protected, and private copying from “obviously illegal” sources is banned. Electronic document delivery under a collective licensing scheme is only lawful if the work is not available in e-form by the publisher. Much lobbying lies ahead, but this is an encouraging step. ------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: New (negative?) book on patents and innovation Date: Wednesday 29 September 2004 4:56 pm From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE> To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7810.html "Adam B. Jaffe is Professor of Economics and Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University. He is the author, with Manuel Trajtenberg, of Patents, Citations, and Innovations: A Window on the Knowledge Economy. Josh Lerner is Jacob H. Schiff professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and the Entrepreneurial Management Units. His books include The Money of Invention." an extract from the blurb... "In one telling vignette, Jaffe and Lerner cite a patent litigation campaign brought by a a semi-conductor chip designer that claims control of an entire category of computer memory chips. The firm's claims are based on a modest 15-year old invention, whose scope and influenced were broadened by secretly manipulating an industry-wide cooperative standard-setting body" If anybody gets the book I'm sure we'd all be interested in their opinion.... Bye, Barry ------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Open Access and journal prices..... Date: Wednesday 29 September 2004 4:48 pm From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE> To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL Dera All, There was an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education at: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i06/06b02001.htm John Ewing, executive director of the American Mathematical Society wrote an article entitled "Open Access to Journals Won't Lower Prices" which provoked the following comment on Library and Information Science News: http://www.lisnews.com/comments.pl?sid=04/09/28/0915216 "Does he have a point, or does he misunderstand the problem? Maybe both--except that I'm a bit inclined to believe that "misunderstand" should be changed to "misdirect," since I think he's engaged in some deliberate sleight of hand himself. Yes, he has a point: When scholarly societies do their own publishing (rather than outsourcing to the big commercial outfits for fast bucks), and when the pricing on those publications is set based on cost and a fair return, rather than being used to make academic libraries pay for all the other activities of the associations, then those publications aren't major parts of the library STM budget problem. Which isn't the same as the access-to-scholarship problem, but it's the part that interests me most (as expounded at absurd length in Cites & Insights [boisestate.edu] over the years). But he's engaged in some red-herring work here. Very few Open Access proponents come from the early "Information wants to be free" nuttiness of the early Internet, and you'll find very few responsible proponents who claim there are no costs involved in online dissemination of scholarly literature. That whole chunk of the article is a straw man or deliberate misdirection: Take your pick. Also the $1,500-per-article citation: That's the PLoS fee; it's much higher than the fee for most BioMed Central journals, and of course infinitely higher than for the otherwise-underwritten journals (sponsored by societies, universities, whatever) that charge neither the writer nor the reader. Perhaps most importantly, his solution is even more implausible than the near-term "defeat" of commercial journals through OA publishing. The inexpensive society journal equivalents for the most expensive portions of STM publishing just don't exist, certainly not generally and at the same prestige level, and PLoS's earliest efforts (the massive "boycott the bad guys" petition effort) showed the effects of asking researchers not to publish in the top journals: Maybe 1% compliance, maybe not that high" ------------------------------------------------------- -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ NEWSFLASH: Complete text of all IUCr journals back to 1948 now online! Visit Crystallography Journals Online for more details _______________________________________________ Epc mailing list Epc@iucr.org http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/epc
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