Many scientists do. As well as the expensive options like PLoS, there are many who just publish on their own blogs, or use tools like arxiv. At the moment, though, the credit structures don't acknowledge the cheap options, so we have to pay for the more expensive process, whether before or after.

Scientific publishing is on a knife edge at the moment. There is a lot of flux in the system. I hadn't heard of ReadCube -- there is also Mendeley and Zotero which offer good reference management capabilities. Then, in terms of journals which are, or are about to appear, there is Elife, F1000 Research, PeerJ. Then there is Figshare which is also NPG now. It's quite an interesting time. Some very big names are going to crash (Elsevier is kind of high on that list of possible losses; fingers crossed Springer goes as well).

The risk is, and I think it is a very real risk, is exactly that what this article suggests. We end up with iTunes; a single, dominant publisher who can define the publishing model, control the sytem regardless of the other stakeholders. It has happened in many other areas: google, facebook, amazon are all obvious examples.

I dislike the status quo intently, but this does not mean that replacing will necessarily produce a better result.

Networks are required to unlock phones, although they are allowed to recover their initial subsidy. The carriers state what their unlock policy is, and in general, if a phone is more than 1 year old, they are likely to do this for free. If they do not, or charge an excessive unlock fee, you can complain to the government regulator.

Most networks try not to tell you this, however. For instance, while looking for my phone I asked in a Virgin store what the unlock fee was: "we don't unlock phones" -- "OFCOM says you do", I replied. "Oh., what I mean is we don't unlock phones in store".

In the end, I bought a SIM free, unlocked phone, and a phone free SIM -- about the same cost as a locked phone and an unlock fee. My old phone (which was Vodaphone-locked) I had unlocked for free, took about 10 minutes. I now use it as a second phone when travelling for either my home SIM or a local, although, in practice at least in Europe, EU regulation means that buying a local SIM is often not worth the effort now.

A nice example of where government regulation can defeat a failed "free" market.

That's not a sensible argument. There are lots of free software projects that have not delivered. There are lots of proprietary projects that haven't delivered either. The standard figure, I believe, is that around 60% of software projects which are paid for and delivered are never used. The fact that Gnu has produced some software that does not get used is hardly good evidence that, therefore, they are not capable.

Incidentally, if you think that RMS' aim is to engineer a completely working free software system, then I think you have miss understood his motivations; free software has, for him, never been about engineering but freedom. He wants a free software system available for people to use, hack, modify, do what ever. His political aim of freedom long ago outweighed his desire to engineer things. So, the existence of linux really has changed the plans of Gnu. They haven't got a web server either; were apache not free, they would do.

Phil

The UK and Europe. He's suggesting UTC, and the zero hour is here.

I sometime Google docs these days for collaborative writing as it avoids the "pass the word doc" around nightmare. Although with dropbox the latter has got easier.
In the end, the proposal gets turned into a word doc though for final formatting, because it is what people expect.

In terms of change tracking, I find this only works in word for a view people. Otherwise, you end up with change tracks everywhere and it's just an unreadable mess. Tex/latex in a versioning system can also work, although again only with so many changes and only if everyone is geeky enough to be able to use it.

I wish their were a perfect workflow, but there really isn't.

Phil

Actually, it doesn't. The results don't look that great, don't work in a web browser, often fail in screen-readers, are harder to archive, very difficult to text extract from. PDF is really pretty much a legacy format.

Short answer; none want epub formats as submissions. But this doesn't mean to say that there is not a desire to produce them from submissions. Lots of scientists and academics want to read articles on the go, without having to carry around lots of paper.

My own experience, however, is that the big move up is from PDF to HTML. This improves the reading experience enormously. EPUB on the other hand is limited. Many ebook readers don't work that well for academic content: mathematics is dealt with badly with non-scalable fonts, graphs and images are poor, citations are not well supported. I haven't see a huge use case for epub yet.

I have helped to create a site for scientists to post their articles on the web. One of the problems is that academics tend to love their tools and do not want to switch, often because they have relatively elaborate workflows and practices, which can cope with their lives; whether this involves writing lots of maths, spending lots of time offline travelling, collaboration or whatever.

We got around this just using Wordpress. Many of the tools out there can already communicate with a blog: this includes Word which, like it or not, is the main tool that scientists use. Others have mentioned things such as asciidoc (which I use). It's okay for short articles, but for a thesis, I would want to use latex. The support for editing in asciidoc is just not as advanced, particulary if you want to do crossreferences, citations, graphs and so on.

There is currently not a good latex -> HTML solution -- in the end, I used PlasTeX to create a tool unimaginatively called latextowordpress. Not perfect, but it works okay in most cases.

http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/2010/08/latex-to-wordpress/

Once you are in wordpress epub and PDF fall out for free, as there are standard plugins for generating these. Personally, I don't do so; I have not found any substantive advantage over HTML, but they are there if you want them.

The process of publishing in this way is not entirely slick, but the results are quite nice. See http://knowledgeblog.org/ and subdomains for examples. And even if the process could be improved, my experience suggests that it is easier than using a commercial publisher. In many cases, it is even less error-prone, as you can see the final published form as you are going, without human intervention in the way.

RMS said that "if X is the case, then Emacs would in violation of GPL". But he also said that he didn't understand the full details of the situation.

Actually, I suspect there wasn't a violation, because the auto-generated lisp files contained comments describing the source. And the source
files are readily available and released under GPL, even if they were not released in the tarballs. I know this because I saw CEDET being
developed and have used aspects of it for years. It all depends on whether the comments in the auto-generated code were rich enough to be able to find the corresponding source.

RMS would have been seriously worried (and rightly so) if the source files were not available at all. But, in fact, they were.

So, this IS clearly an example of not terrible good practice. But it's a cock up, nothing more, and of no real significance. It will be fixed, and I would imagine relatively quickly.

The copyright owners. As this is probably the FSF this would mean that only the FSF could follow up the complaint and sue themselves.

Theoretically, they could sue other people also, who had distributed Emacs, but it's unlikely that they would be successful. If someone violates your copyright because of assurances you have given, it would be hard to then sue that person for this violation.

The thing is that most publishers use an antiquated model. Take one open access publisher that I have used. Their publication process is this:

First I produce a PDF. They convert this to another PDF. This PDF is then converted, BY HAND, to a word doc, which they then convert automatically to HTML and, you guessed it, another PDF. This is pretty standard in the publishing industry. It's no wonder that it is expensive.

We have been trialling out an alternative, on http://knowledgeblog.org./ It works like this. Author writes word doc, presses "publish to blog" button, and, well that's it. The peer review still happens, in the same way, by open posting. Total cost of publishing is that of hosting a Wordpress instance.

The current Open Access model is better than the alternative, but it is only half open. Like the closed model, it is too expensive. Scientific and academic publishing is stifling science. The door has been opened, not it is time to step through it and change the model entirely.

Phil