'This archive contains 18,592 scientific
publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and
which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made
available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited access to the
documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones
are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time
would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
...When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's
sister site for reference works, Wikisource - where they could be tightly interlinked with
Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For
example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the
paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on
publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)
But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the
documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers. As in many
other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction - scanning the
documents - created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete
with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must
have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.
In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially
unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the
fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the
public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.'
--User:Gmaxwell,
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transacti…
'We're projecting today that 2010-11 revenue
will have increased 49% from 2009-10 actuals, to $23.8 million. Spending is projected to
have increased 103% from 2009-10 actuals, to $18.5 million. This means we added $5.3
million to the reserve, for a projected end-of-year total of $19.5 million which
represents 8.3 months of reserves at the 2011-12 spending level.
...We started the year with an ambitious plan to grow the Wikimedia Foundation staff 82%
from 50 to 91 and a decision to, if necessary, sacrifice speed for quality (“hiring well
rather than hiring quickly”). We expect to end the year with staff of 78, representing an
increase over 2009-10 of 56%.'
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Fou…
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net