Category: Access

Elsevier is feeling the strong pressure from a world-wide movement to force them into sensibility about sharing. Universities around the world, including MIT, and many other parties, have signed a strong denouncement here.

Buried within the comments, where Elsevier's Alicia Wise is participating, is this statement that I have accepted in agreeing to do an article for Technology in Society — my article will appear at Phi Beta Iota on the same day that the journal is published.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Elsevier Reeling on Sharing”

Coalition For Free and Open Elections

Full and fair access to the electoral process is a right central to democracy. This right is protected by the U.S. Constitution in the First Amendment which guarantees, among other rights, the freedom to express political views through the electoral process.

This right includes the freedom to register and vote, to form political parties, to run for political office at all levels, to have unhindered access to the ballot and to the means of reaching the public, and to share equally in the benefits given by the state and federal governments to the two major parties and their candidates.

This right is not enjoyed today by voters who seek alternative political choices, nor by independent candidates and alternative political parties. Monopoly of the political process by the two major parties has, in fact, denied the voters an effective range of political choice. A maze of highly technical and restrictive laws has been enacted to bar the full exercise of the constitutional right to participate in the political process.