PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND PRACTICES - COLUMN 158
Elbakyan, a Russian scientist who made more than 48 million journal articles available for free. Elbakyan’s website was sued by Elsevier, which resulted in a court order to take the website down. Elbakyan maintains that the cost of paying for each of the many, maybe hundreds, of articles required for her research was unreasonable. Elbakyan also argues that unlike pirated music or videos, the authors of scientific papers do not financially depend on or receive compensation for their papers from the publishers. Indeed, authors are asked to pay page charges for publications. However, the publishers do incur costs of publication including the peer review and editing processes, the costs of for- matting, printing, etc.
The “publish or perish” mentality (or academic reality) has led to the prolifera- tion of predatory publishers who’ll accept anything as long as the author pays. Peer review and editing are often skipped by such publishers. One such journal, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, recently pub- lished an article titled and consisting entirely of multiple repeated sentences,
Elbakyan also asserts that the publishers’ business model is illegal because it violates article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that, “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
The Geological Society of America is addressing this issue through its Open Access program, which was announced last year. In adopting the Open Access policy, GSA’s budget will loose the sub- stantial subscription revenues it has received that underwrite many GSA programs,
http://www.geosociety.org/ pubs/documents/GSAOpenAccess.pdf. Other professional societies are consid- ering similar programs. Most of AIPG’s publications, including The Professional Geologist, are available for free from the AIPG website.
I agree with Dimmick’s comment, “I see justice in the position of both sides, but I also see wrong on both sides. Somehow it reminds me of the flap over jacking up drug prices.”
Geologic Ethics & Professional Practices is now available on CD
This CD is a collection of arti-
cles, columns, letters to the editor, and other material addressing professional ethics and general issues of professional geolog- ic practice that were printed in The Professional Geologist. It includes an electronic version of the now out-of-print Geologic Ethics and Professional Practices 1987-1997, AIPG Reprint Series #1. The intent of this CD is col- lection of this material in a single place so that the issues and ques- tions raised by the material may be more conveniently studied. The intended ‘students’ of this CD include everyone interested in the topic, from the new student of geology to professors emeritus, working geologists, retired geolo- gists, and those interested in the geologic profession.
AIPG members will be able to
update their copy of this CD by regularly downloading the pe&p index.xls file from the
www.aipg. org under “Ethics” and by down- loading the electronic version of The Professional Geologist from the members only area of the AIPG website. The cost of the CD is $25 for members, $35 for non-members, $15 for student members and $18 for non-mem- ber students, plus shipping and handling. To order go to www.
aipg.org.
IN MEMORY
William ‘Bill’ Knight, CPG-153, passed away October 7, 2015 in Tulsa.
Bill was born May 23, 1927 in Moundsville, West Virginia, to Marion E. Knight and Alma Bonar Knight. He served in the US Coast Guard in 1945 until the end of World War II. He attended the University of West Virginia and then joined the US Army, served in Korea, and honorably discharged in 1948. He attended Ohio State University receiving a BS in Geology in 1951. He received a Masters in Geology in 1968 and served as an adjunct professor at the University of Tulsa.
Bill worked in the oil business in Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma until 1989, when he moved to Colorado to become Executive Director of the American Institute of Professional Geologists. He retired in 1999 and returned to Tulsa.
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www.aipg.org Apr.May.Jun 2016 TPG 33
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