brianhouse

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

• I am brianhouse on github.
• I am brianhouse (https://keybase.io/brianhouse) on keybase.
• I have a public key whose fingerprint is C9CC 3E54 7385 AF8C 3BA3 E899 AAB2 2BBB 6B92 9B75

To claim this, I am signing this object:

brianhouse

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific a