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Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

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40hz:
It (the ideology) doesn't make sense to me, as it stands, unless it is deliberate, in order to force people to move to high density population centres as per my quote:
So, the provision of non-statutory healthcare and non-essential services are being progressively rationalised and centralised to points in or near relatively high-density population centres.
That is probably likely to encourage a human migration out of the small towns/villages to the nearest city. They could become ghost towns/villages over time.
-IainB (January 09, 2012, 04:58 AM)
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What you say about your client's X-ray travel would seem to support that - i.e., it could well be deliberate.
-IainB (February 11, 2012, 08:34 AM)
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Robin Hood and every other outlaw learned the advantages of having a large forest nearby. People in cities are easy to deal with. People running around the countryside much less so. So why make it any easier for those who are out in the sticks to remain there? It's inefficient for the administration of public services. And we all know this lot is up to no good - if not today, then certainly tomorrow. Anti-social buggers!  ;)

During the Viet Nam war, the South Vietnamese government and the US military adopted a policy of conducting "pacification actions" (which mostly meant destroying "suspect VC-friendly" villages and rural farms) with the overall goal of forcing the rural population to migrate into urban areas where they could be more easily monitored and controlled. (Not tinfoil hat btw. This has been verified by official documents that were obtained back when the FOIA was still taken seriously.)

So yes... There may be some vague governmental notion (in the absence of an actual long-term plan) that it's generally not a good idea to encourage people to remain living in less densely populated areas.

Besides, if things keep going the way they are in so much of the western world, that empty countryside is going to be needed very shortly.

For detention centers.  :o

IainB:
Speaking of Elsevier (which we were): 1000 scientists and counting boycott Elsevier journal publishing
-IainB (January 30, 2012, 04:29 AM)
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Wow. It's apparently now up to 8,800 scholars and scientists boycotting Elsevier - and counting: An Open Letter to Academic Publishers About Open Access

Carol Haynes:
There is a move in the UK to make all scientific research papers free when there has been any public funding involvement. To allow journals to cover their costs and make it worth their while printing stuff there will be a six month 'publication only' window where free access is not automatic but after six months all research paper must be made free to download.

Obviously most of the journals aren't happy as they make money charging for per article access and corporate subscriptions.

Rip off merchants like Elsevier are even more unhappy because it will put them out of business - and quite right too. They do nothing at all for public or scientific interest and just make money by charging for access to articles that should be free anyway.

I know I saw an article on this the BBC but can't find it. There is this article though in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science

Another couple of articles I have found:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/michael-eisen-open-science/
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/make-tax-funded-scientific-research-public-1.3555902

(though how useful they are I don't know)

http://www.nature.com/news/elsevier-boycott-gathers-pace-1.10010

Renegade:
That boycott there sounds like a very good thing.

Resisting temptation to rant about academia... working very hard...

Ok.

Coming up with a system to publish scientific papers really isn't that hard. It could even easily be done in real time. Any farting around on the issue is simply due to a lack of imagination. The ONLY problem would be user identification and verification, and even that's not all that difficult to solve.

Actually, I'm getting a few ideas that would be pretty darn wild to implement... Hmmm...

mouser:
Amen! The scientific journal scam has to end -- these scientific articles, funded in good part by public dollars, need to be free.

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