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Creative Commons For Science
chrisspurgeon writes "The folks at Creative Commons are rolling out a new project aimed at improving the dissemination of scientific publications and data. The National Institutes of Health is already proposing mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research, and many scientists welcome the free redistribution of their papers, they just don't know the legal details of how to do it. The Science Commons project will take on the copyright problems unique to scientists (things like pre and post prints, and electronic vs. paper journal distribution)."
The battle for accessible culture is important, but the battle for accessible science is more important (IMO).
Keep up the good work!
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With all the discussions in previous years regarding the government trying to decide what scientists can and cannot post in journals, I am hoping this can further put the government at a distance and allow free information to remain, well, free.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
I think this is excellent, but only academic and possibly government funded research will use this. The pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies will continue to do their own thing and make billions.
It has never been difficult for crackpots with agendas to spread rubbish; usually with a purchased 'of the shelf' diploma under their belt.
What would be an idea is a repository of CC licenced scientific papers which academic critics can review.
Alternatively, Universites could run their own dedicated sites for papers; they *only* allow papers from their University to be made available there but anyone can read / reproduce them under the terms of the licence.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'm a US government scientist, just found out that journals must have two types of copyright agreements, don't know if this is universal:
1. For most people, all rights go to [journal].
2. If more than X co-authors are US. government employees, the work must be Public Domain.
I believe this is forced on the journals as the price of accepting work from government scientists. This, is a Good Thing the government is doing (for once) over publishing industry. Don't know if this is universal across agencies, journals, sorry if the above paraphrase is impeferfect (legalese isn't in front of me right now).
> Will this not make it much easier for crackpots with agendas to spread bogus/bullshit scientific "facts"?
I don't think so. The Creative Commons idea doesn't affect peer-review, reputation, etc., that are the bedrock of legitimate scientific publications. What it will do is make it easier for crackpots (and the rest of us) to read significant scientific publications.
If the government funds your research, you should not be able to patent it and must make it, your source data, your computer programs, and your source code publically available for free.
That data, source code must be public domain or at least a BSD style license. This follows the federal government in that its publications are public domain.
Additionally, a financial statement of how you spent your taxpayer funded research money should be available for free, and be published on the internet.
In other words,
a. You can't profit from goverment grants
b. You cannot hide what you do with the grant money
c. Anyone can take your work without licensing fees or licensing legal agreements for any purpose.
I don't know. Maybe it's just because most free access journals are unknown startups with no established history. If you submit a manuscript to one of the established and prestigious scientific journals such as Science, Nature or PRL (at least in my field), it's not only going to be peer reviewed but it's going to be subjected to a peer-review-from-hell. That, on the other hand, is unlikely to happen if you submit it to a free access journal...
The owls are not what they seem
copyrights are granted by default. For example, this post is copyright(c) 2004, Naikrovek, and I don't need to say that to get copyright.
If I were making this post or publishing work that I'd done for some government or company, then the copyright goes to that government or company, because that published work was written by an extension of the government or company (me) and is thier property.
If that guy invented CDs and DVDs (or the technology behind them) did so as part of his job, he will get nothing. Gallileo got nothing but prison time for his discoveries. Archimedes got nothing for his discoveries. Not fair, but a reality.
I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.
But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.
There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.
Other than publications, the American Physical Society , for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.
make world, not war
This is the idea of "free" as in speech, people. And this is why the free software paradigm is more important than just getting stuff done and providing low-cost solutions. Bio-research is extremely heavily encumbered with patents and costs. I'm extremely happy to see several initiatives (see for example the BIOS initiative and the open access initiative) slowly gain momentum.
Hell, we had to pay to get an article published (quite common) and then pay another 30$ to get a copy of the journal issue (and, no, there is not such thing as free internet access for high-profile journals) to read our own article.
I really want publishers and research companies to make money, but public funded research must be free for all. This is humanity's intellectual property, not the coca-cola recipe!
P.
I'm not worried about scientists, I'm worried about the average boob who believes anything he sees on TV, because a "certified scientician" says so.
Like that Clonex or whoever, the UFO cult who claimed they cloned a human being. Despite the fact they couldn't even produce a photograph of the cloned baby, the media (thanks to a slow news week) plastered this "breakthrough" everywhere.
The average dope still thinks it's true.
People think that abortions cause breast cancer, because some born-again christian "scientist" said so (with nothing to back it up). People hear "science" and think it's true, they don't do the research to find out that this guy is alone in his belief.
Hell, every other day the media feeds us a story about "wine is good for you! it prevents cancer", and then the next day "wine is bad for you! it causes cancer!"
The problem is more with the media than the scientific community, I just worry about a giant collection of catchy scientific headlines for slow news days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
I am a female physicist and I think using the number of times a paper was cited as the sole test of how good the work was is a dangerous idea. In the space sciences, there are so many papers published every year, in many different journals, that it is impossible for anyone to read them all. What happens is that a lot of scientists will only read papers by established, experienced scientists that have built a strong reputation over many years. This means that the papers cited most often tend to be written by older men, and papers written by younger scientists and women tend to be cited far less often.
I find this quite disturbing, since when I recently did a journal article search for papers on a particular topic, I found an article published by a well-respected scientist in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal that was total garbage. In spite of the fact that the paper was just terrible, it had been cited many times. I know a lot of people who will cite a paper in their own work that was cited in a paper they recently read without bothering to check the original paper first.
I wonder how many people have actually read some of these papers that have been cited more than 100 times. Probably less than 50% of the people who cite a particular paper have actually bothered to look up the paper and read it carefully.