Two years ago, when posting a review article on Arxiv, I did the experiment of putting it in the public domain. The idea was to allow anyone to distribute and even to modify it, in the hope of increasing the circulation and usefulness of the article, as I explained in
this blog post.
Putting the text in the public domain also has potential drawbacks:
- losing revenue,
- losing control.
The potential loss of revenue is not a problem for me, as I am already employed and paid to do research by the French research agency CNRS. In fact I am not sure whether scientists should earn money from their professional writings or patents. Anyway, in the case of such a specialized text, the potential revenue would be small.
The potential loss of control is a priori more worrisome. Could my reputation be damaged if someone did something bad with my text? In order to find out, I had to wait until people actually did something with my text.
Enters Amazon
My review article is now available
for sale on Amazon, in the Kindle format, at the price of about $9. I had nothing to do with that edition, I guess it was done by an Amazon robot.
