Google has made it its companies premise to make the worlds knowledge available to everyone. As an effort for that, scanning copyright-free books, papers, pergaments, scrolls, codices,... has happened already and made accessible this or that way. But we see also that a lot of those classical works have been made into nicely edited and commented works by publishers. Some of those works neither contain sophisticated art or elaborate layout. For example if you buy Penguin classics books or Reclam books, their only media is recycling paper and pure text sometimes cursive or fat or underlined with some rare diagrams. But the scientific comments are useful. I have two questions connected with that: If i download a digitalised book fom let us say 1850 of 500 MB size and 240 pages wouldn't it be more efficent to download one nicely typeset and error-corrected and commented version of that book of 1 or 2 MB ? On one side such works are not copyrighted anymore, on the other side publishers greedily guard what should be open to the public because of humanistic reasons. Of course, having a carefully digitalised version of certain works like codices, pergaments aso. available in its original form is of great scientific value, but on the other side it would be equally important to have derivative works available in the public domain. It is also known that most modern textbooks which cost in shop hundreds of bucks can be downloaded these days form more or less obscure sources for free. So the facts are that the scientific community is a bunch of money-mongering greed-puppets and the ideal of free science gets only fulfilled in obscure channels. In effect this displays modern scientists with a career as unworthy of their jobs whereas those people who want to relate to the free scientific community are criminals so to speak.
Dear Thomas Korimort ,
a good, detailed and interesting question!
As an author in Germany I say: protect auhtors rights. And publishers rights.
But as a scholar I would also like to stress that books that are out of print should be published in the public domain to make them available for research and discussion and reception...
I really am a fan of open science and open access and often am trying to publish under sherpa/romeo licences in repositories or data/technical reports here on RG...
Best,
Carsten
Dear Thomas Korimort ,
a good, detailed and interesting question!
As an author in Germany I say: protect auhtors rights. And publishers rights.
But as a scholar I would also like to stress that books that are out of print should be published in the public domain to make them available for research and discussion and reception...
I really am a fan of open science and open access and often am trying to publish under sherpa/romeo licences in repositories or data/technical reports here on RG...
Best,
Carsten
Open access has been sharing free knowledge with the whole world which I think is good enough. However, in some cases, copyrights should be preserved for both authors and publishers.
Dear Carsten and Hassan! Thanks for your comments. Though i feel that major issues raised in my short exposition are not addressed by either of you at all.
Dear Thomas Korimort , do you really believe in what you have written: "So the facts are that the scientific community is a bunch of money-mongering greed-puppets and the ideal of free science gets only fulfilled in obscure channels. In effect this displays modern scientists with a career as unworthy of their jobs whereas those people who want to relate to the free scientific community are criminals so to speak."? It is serious accusation of your colleagues ...
There are many legal issues in this area.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/
Dear Ljubomir!
I have no colleagues. I am retired because of schizophrenia since 10 years. That time my "colleagues" were not so concerned what happened to me. I also found that human rights courts don't concern, if they can push away what they don't want to see. My career and my life was stolen by my "colleagues". I still feel sometimes that even after so many years without work people try to obligate me by calling on long ago expired contracts to save their souls. I am pretty sure that this is no legal practice at all. Maybe some of my former "colleagues" don't/didn't (want to) know the difference between mutual compliance and robbing someone in a dark corner of the street. And that is why these days small problems can become a world wide issue easily.
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