[Cryptography] Lockdown copyright survey paper on proof engineering

[John Gilmore]

Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> Here's a link to a new and interesting survey paper on proof
> engineering for formal verification of software systems. It's free to
> download until September 10th.

No, it's marketed as "free to download" but that means free as in beer,
not in freedom.  You can't log in unless you create an account, and you
can't create an account unless you accept their "terms and conditions"
and provide an email address and a password.  I haven't seen what else
happens if you actually do give them an email and a (useless except for
tracking you) password, but it involves at least spamming you, according
to the terms.

Perry, why are you sending us to a proprietary captive portal designed
to track us and market to us?  Haven't the authors published this paper
on their own website or in a "preprint" archive that's publicly
accessible?  The site claims that authors retain their copyrights
and are free to publish articles themselves ("self-archiving by
author permitted"):

  https://www.nowpublishers.com/Home/About

If the authors actually do retain their copyrights then they should
be free to additionally release the paper under a CC license.

Perhaps we need to update "Friends don't send friends to Google" to
include proprietary journal publishers too.  I was surprised and pleased
to recently notice that the entire University of California (UC) system
has stopped subscribing to all 2500 proprietary Elsevier journals, after
extensive negotiations, because Elsevier wouldn't budge on allowing free
public access to all papers written by researchers from all UC campuses?
See:

  https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-terminates-subscriptions-worlds-largest-scientific-publisher-push-open-access-publicly
  https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2019/08/fact-check-uc-and-elsevier/

Let's follow their lead in refusing to support academic publishers'
business models that lock down useful information forever, even when the
research was paid for by taxpayers in the first place.

	John