Kopimism: the world's newest religion explained - opinion - 06 January 2012 - New Scientist; Open access and Ecological Society of America

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html

:D

Why is information, and sharing it, so important to you?
Information is the building block of everything around me and everything I believe in. Copying it is a way of multiplying the value of information.

What's your stance on illegal file-sharing?
I think that the copyright laws are very problematic, and at least need to be rewritten, but I would suggest getting rid of most of them.

So all file-sharing should be legal?
Absolutely.

Are you just trying to make a point, or is this religion for real?
We've had this faith for several years.

I would love to hear their stance on open access in science ..

YHGTBFKM: Ecological Society of America letter regarding #OpenAccess is disturbing

Granted that when I go into the exciting bits of human genomics research that I do at gatherings, my well heeled friends often give me a glass eyed look and acknowledge that what I do is interesting but show no particular interest in what I do ..
I still strongly feel that scientific information is best served as a free for all buffet.
If a majority of key scientific information becomes closed access. I think that there is a risk that science as practiced globally might be end up looking like cliched science projects at high school science fairs.
I personally feel that what open access journals and work from journal of negative results, is working towards is a reduction of duplication of efforts at adding to the sum of human knowledge.
Reading about the plausible reasons for why politicians might be backing a bill to shut down NIH's open access policy is saddening to say the least. quite honestly the sum for the payment for publication is negligible to the sum paid for publicly funded research. There isn't a strong reason that I can understand to make publicly funded research privy info unless it's defence issues which would mean it shouldn't be published in a scientific journal at all.

For more on this see

• Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research from my brother Michael Eisen http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807
• Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science? from Rebecca Rosen at the Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/why-is-open-internet-champion-darrell-issa-supporting-an-attack-on-open-science/250929/
• New bill to block open access to publicly-funded research from Peter Suber https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L
• Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act from John Dupais http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2012/01/scholarly_societies_its_time_t.php