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NASA puts first Curiosity Rover scientific papers behind a paywall?

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40hz:
This is an interesting one. NASA has published the first 5 papers on it's Curiosity Mars Rover. But they did it through Science Magazine - which promptly locked them behind their paywall - and demanded $20 for a one-day pass to read them.

Fortunately, biologist Michael Eisen of UC Berkeley is a little more up on copyright rules and relevant laws for US Government projects than either NASA or Science Magazine apparently are. Michael 'liberated' and put all 5 article PDFs up on his blog site for download along with a rather pointed essay discussing why NASA should know better (from both a legal and a public relations perspective) than to try something like that.

NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover, I am setting them free
By Michael Eisen | Published: September 26, 2013

The Mars Curiosity rover has been a huge boon for NASA – tapping into the public’s fascination with space exploration and the search for life on other planets. Its landing was watched live by millions of people, and interest in the photos and videos it is collecting is so great, that NASA has had to relocate its servers to deal with the capacity.

So what does NASA do to reward this outpouring of public interest (not to mention to $2.5 billion taxpayer dollars that made it possible)? They publish the first papers to arise from the project behind a Science magazine’s paywall...<more>
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Apparently NASA got the message. Because the JPL has since re-published the same articles and made them freely available from their own website - where they should have been released to begin with.

Mike's blog post is really interesting and informative. There's several points he made that may be handy to remember if you're ever in a position where some government agency is attempting to freeze you out of reports and information you already paid them to produce with your tax dollars.

Read it here.

(With thanks to Boing Boing for spotting this!) :Thmbsup:

TaoPhoenix:
I have the page loaded to read in more detail in a min, but it's nice to see someone slowly passing along the news that the copyright games are NOT okay. And this might be a useful top level strategy - first push back on the clear slam dunks, to get people to notice that abuses are happening, then later you can fight for the murkier cases that are getting stonewalled for some reason.

Renegade:
The only ambiguity in the case of these Curiosity papers is that not all of the authors are US Government employees, and thus the work is, I am told “co-owned” by the authors. I’m not sure what effect this has on the ability of Science magazine to assert copyright in the work, since, at best, they are doing so at the behest of only a subset of the authors. The law makes it clear that its intent is to direct the US government authors to place the work in the public domain, and that any agreement they enter into to restrict access to the work is invalid. This is why I view the practice of taking works authored (and funded) by the US government and placing them behind paywalls to be illegitimate.
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Perhaps the contracted authors claim copyright in the vowels?

D__ch_b_gg_ry. Would you like to buy a vowel? :P

wraith808:
D__ch_b_gg_ry. Would you like to buy a vowel?
-Renegade (September 30, 2013, 06:04 PM)
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You have a way with words, Ren. :P

Renegade:
D__ch_b_gg_ry. Would you like to buy a vowel?
-Renegade (September 30, 2013, 06:04 PM)
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You have a way with words, Ren. :P
-wraith808 (September 30, 2013, 06:21 PM)
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Wh_, th_nk y__! 8)

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