Tim Tyler  wrote:


> TT:-
> Subject: Publishing scientific information
> If what *I* have to say is important or truly novel I want to place
> it into the public domain - so that every individual on the planet
> has free and unrestricted access to it as rapidly as possible.
> What I *don't* want to do is copyright it - and then attempt to
> *restrict* viewers to those prepared to pay for the information.
> That would represent a crude attempt to limit the cirulation of what
> I have to say tremendously - for the sake of making a few bucks.
> I typically don't want to do that - I'd rather have a wide audience
> than a tiny one.

JE:-
It can be a "chicken and egg argument". The private 
sector exists via profits. Unless a research
journal can be sold for money, private research 
that is unbiased (i.e. not subsidised) fails to materialise.
Unbiased research requires the actual research to make the
money putting the profit motive squarely on refutable 
truth and nothing else. This requires pure research to 
be sold within journals or applied research to raise
money using patents. OTOH the public sector is
financed using taxation. To charge the public
twice is simply not ethical. Public funded
research journals should be freely available
on the internet because he public paid fore them
in advance.

> TT:-
> "Prestigious journals" are actually censored, pay-per-view forums.
> Basically, the existing laws create a scientific publishing circus -
> where articles acquire flashy headlines and startling conclusions
> which seem evidently more designed to sell the journals they are
> published in than to advance science - and abstracts become the
> equivalent of getting the first hit for free :-(

JE:-
This circus is mostly due to the fact
of artificially limited competition. 
Because most pure research remains publicly 
funded "peer review" can be 
abused to reduce competition. Here more 
powerful individuals attempt to maintain a 
higher status position against competition
from lower status individuals with
better ideas by having these individuals and 
their ideas unethically censored. Such 
events can delay/stops the evolution of 
science and are to nobodies absolute
advantage. 

Peer review is a very complex process
because we are all biased.
You can prove this using double blind
cross over testing. This is why I argue
that an sbe peer review process to 
electronically publish sbe papers would 
be of immense value because it would
bring some of these problems out into 
the open as well as supplying a reachable
goal for sbe subscribers and a higher grade
of evolutionary theory information within
sbe itself.

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

PO Box 266
Church Pt
NSW 2105
Australia

edser{at}tpg.com.au
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