Academic Publishers: Suicide Bombers Against the Academy

I lost my marbles the other day when I saw this article from Cambridge University press offering to rent me some academic articles:

For just £3.99, $5.99 or €4.49, users are now able to read single articles online for up to 24 hours, a saving of up to 86 per cent, compared with the cost of purchasing the article.

Of course, you can’t save, print, or do anything with the article except read it on line, then it disappears. What useless crap! Say you’re doing some research and you need a citation. $5.99 might be OK if you only needed one article. But the average academic article has 20-100 citations. And honestly, a good article is not something you read once and have done with it – you need to check it a few times and do some re-reading to absorb it. So this rental is really just a ‘teaser’ – it’s just enough access to decide if you really need to have something, after which you have the privilege of buying one of these articles for $30-$75. Yes, that’s really how much they charge! For one fucking article!

So when I read something like this:

Cambridge University Press is committed to widening dissemination and lowering barriers to accessing journal articles.

… I can smell the bullshit. Article rental is a scam. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg in the larger and much more heinous scam being run by the major academic publishers – Springer, Thomson, Elsevier, a few others – who are looting the academic commons for private profit while denying access to the public and increasing inequality.

Does that sound harsh? I hope so. Because most academic knowledge is produced by scholars whose pay comes from the public purse. The rest – i.e. tuition dollars – is still subsidized heavily by the government as in the form of below-market-rate student loans.

Mexico vs. Starbucks

Here's a weird little tidbit from last week:

Starbucks Corp.'s Mexico unit says it is willing to pay for permission to sell coffee mugs featuring pre-Hispanic images, after the Mexican government notified it about potential violations of intellectual property rights.

Starbucks said Thursday it regrets any misunderstanding, and "we are willing to pay the appropriate amount for the use of these images."

Mexico's government archaeological agency says the images of the Aztec calendar stone and the Pyramid of the Moon from the pre-Aztec ruins of Teotihuacan are the intellectual property of the nation. The agency will decide how much Starbucks should pay.

Starbucks says a supplier was responsible for securing permission for the mugs, which have been temporarily withdrawn from sale. (AP, via Business Week)

Of course the monuments and artifacts in question belong to Mexico in a legal sense, but I find the idea of archaeological sites as a category of intellectual property pretty disturbing. If Mexico could license the images to Starbucks, the implication is that these things are like any other category of property, which one could buy and sell. Could countries then sell the copyrights to archaeological sites and their data, in the way that Michael Jackson or the Beatles have sold their catalogues? When does Mexico start charging licensing fees for using pictures in textbooks?

I dislike the whole concept. Considering culture strictly as property is a recipe for disaster. By the same token, however, it would be nice for countries to be able to assert their rights over heritage in their territories and ensure noncommercial uses. Seems to me we need some variant of the Creative Commons licenses for cultural property.