history of the DDG

Sort of like Hollywood.

Physics Today comp'd him a subscription. He sent it back.

John

Hey, how 'bout awarding Grammies in physics?

"And the winner for 'Best Physicist of 2008' is: Albert Gore" .

Cheers, James Arthur

Spreading the information is good, useful, and worth something.

I propose publicly-funded research be public domain, free of copyright. Then let the market decide what its distribution is worth.

Cheers, James Arthur

AFAIUI publicly-funded research is supposed to be public domain with patent rights accruing to the government, but the universities play games to cheat the public.

Someone should sue.

Everyone should drop their IEEE membership ;-)

...Jim Thompson

My memory may be playing games on me, but I seem to recall that it was early under the Reagan administration that the ability for a university to sell (read: own in such a way to be able to have a right to sell) publicly funded research. There was a strange justification in the news, playing at the time. I'll see about looking this up. I could be wrong.

Jon

I am not so sure. I recall a clerical error in the UK institution that was supposed to patent academic inventions which they interpretted narrowly as "widgets" and so failed to patent the invention of monoclonal antibodies. The licence revenue from that single invention could have funded most of UK science for a decade. Thatcher always blamed the inventor for this, but it wasn't his fault at all.

If academics invent something truly spectacular (like Polaroid for instance) why should they not have the opportunity to patent and capitalise on their invention? Most top universities have spin off science parks around them with venture capital funding already lined up.

And what do you do about scientific papers submitted by the likes of AT&T, IBM employees? They do some blue sky stuff as well.

Regards, Martin Brown

Ah, yes. My memory is very close in terms of timing. It was the Bayh-Dole Act, now known as 35 U.S.C. § 200-212 and 37 C.F.R. 401. It was passed in 1980, over the opposition of President Carter.

Very bad. But there it is.

Jon

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Not all of them. Here's what Ronald Plasterk - an emminent Dutch scientist - had to say on the subject

he is an interesting guy.

and one of the (many) people behind the Open Access Journals initiative.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Allowing a profit motive might usefully focus research to emphasize the practical and valuable. That might also be bad, squeezing out basic research (academics are amazingly money-seeking).

That might be worth considering, as it apparently already has been in the US (per Jon Kirwan).

OTOH, I don't see how it benefits society to limit the access to magazines announcing those discoveries.

Because they did it with public money. If you paid me to develop something, should I own it?

If they paid for it, it's theirs. Simple.

Regards, James Arthur

Don't know if any use but I've scans of a "Precision Digital delay generator for Radar and Sonar calibration and target Simulation". ('Electronics' December 1955.)

What can I offer for a copy? Need any parts?

John

message

generator

Looks like it IS of interest :). Scans not from the actual magazine article but the 1959 circuit collection by John Marcus (McGraw Hill). Lots of really interesting stuff was happening in the early fifties. I've put the PDF on ABSE.

John

Springer-Verlag is pretty bad as well.

I started seeing it in the late 1980's, and it has been getting worse ever since.

The whole publishing industry has gone mad. Including the RIAA and MPAA variants.

Yes, and the "journal publishers" used this to invert the normal Author - Publisher financial relationship, and con Authors to pay (who just passed it on as a cost to the funding source).

That is a better approach, perhaps give the publisher a year, then it goes public domain. That will stop the most egregious abuses.

It sure sounds very "reagonomics" to me.