Answer for: Do intellectual property laws have a negative or positive impact on society and culture?
#7 Science copyright laws are seriously in need of reform.
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Traditionally, authors of scientific papers have been completely at the mercy of journal publishers. Ignorance on the part of authors and greed on the publishers ' side have until recently kept authors from claiming any rights whatsoever to their own intellectual output. Authors were understandably not as concerned about retaining the few rights they already had as they were about getting their work published in prestigious journals- the institutional publish-or-perish problem- academic tenure, retention of jobs at corporations and institutions. Open-access publishing models, Creative Commons licenses, institutional repositories and some relaxation of publishers' policies have started changing this tradition. Latest but not least in this trend is the NIH mandate that puts all government-sponsored (i.e., taxpayer-sponsored) scientific output in the public domain after one year. This is still inadequate, but a great improvement for you and me, who until this change were not able to read scientific or medical articles until they were really old news, unless we were willing to pay for them a second time.
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we'll see how this goes, the times are a changin' but its a very entrenched system
for those without library access who want a particular article, I highly recommend just writing the author, I send out copies of my papers to anyone who requests them personally all the time.
That's good of you. And I have advised people to do this when we had no access and no library could lend the material. It sometimes works. Sometimes the author is too ancient or disorganized to be able to locate it, but normally they are happy that someone is that interested.