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Copyright Advocacy Group Violates Copyright
word munger writes "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermarks and all — without paying for their use."
My guess would be that the point of the watermark is to shame people who are copying the image without permission.
How we know is more important than what we know.
No, royalty-free is different from free. Royalty-free means that you don't have to pay based on the number of uses of the images. It does NOT mean you get it for free.
ScienceSeeker.org
I work at Getty, and while I'm a code monkey and not in the biz side of it, I'm pretty sure we don't sell images w/the watermark still visible. (I've had to write code dealing with our rights-management crap, and I've never seen anything about "keeping the watermark")
:)
Hell, if they just wanted a legit cheap picture, they'd have gone to iStockPhoto.
I notice a lot of comments pointing out, reasonably, that since we the taxpayers have already payed for research, we should not be expected to pay for it again to the benefit of a few businessmen with a special interest.
The concept makes sense...to most of us, at any rate.
The U.S. Government, however, disagrees.
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Yes, we paid and paid, and we all know just how expensive it must be for them
to maintain a website...
I am an amateur researcher, working on my own bucks - my table top fusor is already
making neutrons, for example. I wanted access to rev sci instruments
back to the way past as a lot of what I'm doing would find some help from that.
Ok, they hide the pricing pretty well, that's the first sign. Assuming I get the
good guy rates, that mag is on the order of several hundred bucks a year. Ouch, but I
could afford that if it gave me backwards access on the web.
Access to past? May as well be priceless even for this millionaire. Try over 70k at the
cheapest rates in a bundle of things I don't want. Shades of cable TV (which I refuse to get)!
These guys need public shaming. They claim to be promoting science. Bah.
They sure built a pretty building for themselves...
These guys do no science, fund no science, charge for publication on both sides.
What AAhats.
It's not even hard to do so. A lot the publicly funded research builds on non-publicly funded work that has previously been done at the same place or that is being done in parallel with the publicly funded stuff in that very same place. It's not like you can always carve out a complete research item and work on it independently of prior knowledge or of any additional non-public funding.
I've worked in research for many years, and we always had a combination of public and private/corporate funding ongoing for just about anything we did. In fact, doing so was a necessity, as there was no way we could have built and sustained the critical mass needed to be able to even qualify for most public funding if we had been using only public money. In fact, on most programs we got a maximum of 50% public funds. We had to put part of our results in the open in return by publishing, or by providing free licenses to certain parties (who needn't always be a member of the research program). But our work always included material and IP that was privately funded as well. Because of all this, we actually developed a model in which we even gave access to some of the privately funded bits developed with money from company X to company Y (and vice versa) or even to "the public". But it goes without saying that no company X or Y would have funded us if we'd have applied that model to everything we did, just because someone in our lab who was "working on the same big picture" had a public fellowship or was working within the scope of a governmental project.
Linux user since early January 1992.
That's the point of view that I have. I'm lucky enough to be at an institution with rather liberal IP rules (William and Mary). Larger institutions have patent foundations, which are fundamentally against the whole point of research since the patent foundation wants/claims ownership of things you discover, and would rather you didn't publish it.
Happily, I haven't had a problem inserting "release code as open source" as a bullet in all my grant proposals. Since the grant proposal is a contract of sorts, I can point to the proposal (that the institution signed off on) if any lawyer starts hassling me about disclosing patentable discoveries.
Note to all you folks in grad school: put everything you can, including printouts of your code, as appendices in your thesis. Your thesis is copyright you, so the institution can't keep your work (in the thesis) as their own.
I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention". Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics, but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free, and them charge federal government for those same articles? Measures to ensure that the feds can download and copy those articles for free is "interfering"? Oh boy!
How about some proper negotiation with those publishers about copyrights? How about setting up all-electronic Open Source journals that offer access free of charge, and let commercial publishers compete with the Open Source journals for articles they want to publish? Or is that "compromising the viability" of the commercial offerings?
Yes ... on the subject of "compromising the viability". Joe Sixpack might not recognise this statement for the fallacy it is. Research is carried out (often funded by federal government), and written of for free by the researchers who did it. Peer review of scientific articles is carried out for free by scientists in their field. Those are the "peers" that conduct peer-review. And they are *not* funded by the publishers, the are funded by their respective employers (universities, companies), and by the individual researchers themselves, who will often spend their own time reviewing papers..
Now it's widely known that todays science publishing is big business (commercial science publishers post excellent earnings every year) and scientific journals are terribly expensive (just ask any university library near you).
The fun part is that commercial publishers really do very little for the journals they publish. Just consider:
- the raw material is delivered to them in the electronic format of their choice, free of charge
- they must then employ a qualified editor who does the first crude selection. (This individual will have to be paid be paid a good salary, say $60k - $80k a year.)
- then they send the articles to individual researchers for peer-review. This takes a few hours of secretarial support, a rolodex, and an email account.
- then they read the comments from the peer reviewers that help them decide whether the article is publishable, and they route the comments to the authors for improvement and response
- finally they receive the amended article, in electronic form, do a final check, and have it typeset.
That's all. The little secret is that commercial publishers don't really add that much of value. But a library subscription can easily come to $8,000 - $12,000 per year. How many of them would you need to cover your costs? Publishers don't let on obviously, but a fair guess is that $200,000 annually will be enough to keep a journal running. That would be, say 40 subscriptions of $5
I worked at Getty, and use of watermarked images is prohibited. "Royalty-free" = when you license an RF image, you can use it in any application, for as long as you like, in as many different projects as you like (eg: a printed ad with 1,000,000 copies).
The journal subscription fees, which fund the editorial staff and so forth, are paid by libraries at universities and government labs (which, again, receive money from university funds and/or government grants). So, again, a good fraction of the costs are being covered by public funds. The scientific journals could not continue operating without the money coming from public sources, so the question remains: why does the public have to pay to read material that they have already funded in other ways? You misunderstand the intentions of the open-access movement. Scientists are not asking for peer review to be eliminated. Quite the opposite: having the information more open can only enhance the amount of open criticism and discussion of science. The intention is to have journals continue to rely on volunteer reviewers, and to cover journal editorial costs using publication fees instead of subscription fees. So, instead of the public paying to read the final article, the authors would pay a charge when they are publishing, and the results become freely available.
In the end, this changes very little from the financial perspective of the scientific institutes. If journals switched to open access, then institutes would pay publication charges instead of subscription charges. The net effect would be the same for them. The upshot is that the public, and smaller research labs, have better access to scientific knowledge. In no case is peer review removed from the process.
In fact, take note that many high-impact open-access journals are starting to appear (most notably the publications of the Public Library of Science). These new journals are maintaining the rigor of the peer-reviewed scientific process.
In the end, the Journals and publishers still make money under an open access paradigm. So why do they resist it? The usual reasons: they fear change, they fear competition, and they may make less money than they are currently used to. But science will continue.
[T]here are actual people in the world, who PAY for some research through their taxes, and then does not want the ownership of it through public domain.
I've read quite a number of histories of science in which the authors point out that the Western "scientific revolution" during the last few centuries has nothing to do with discovering "the scientific method". Scientific methods have been independently discovered in nearly all societies, going back into prehistory. One example I ran across recently was the comment that from what we know of their methods, the North American Indians' "medicine men" had better medicine than Europe did until sometime in the 1800s. The reason was that the medicine men actually had better scientific methodology than European doctors did. But then things changed
So what caused the big advances in Western science in the past few centuries? The historians answer to this is simple: open publication. In all other societies, such knowledge has almost always been strictly controlled by small "guilds". The knowledge was secret, and discoveries were usually not even shared with colleagues outside the discoverer's immediate circle of professionals. This meant that everything had to be rediscovered over and over again. You could only learn what your mentors knew, and you could only build on what they passed on to you, because everyone else's knowledge was unavailable to you.
But a few hundred years ago, some researchers in Europe developed a curious new approach: They published their discoveries openly, making them available for others to read, use, and build on. This led to the explosive growth of knowledge that we're familiar with.
In most of the West, such open publication is historically done only by government researchers. Before the 20th century, this meant the few idle rich such as Isaac Newton, who had brains and curiosity. So it took a while to really get going. But in the 1900s, various governments slowly got it through their thick skulls that funding research was one of the things that was building other countries' economies (and militaries), so maybe they should be funding research too. Then things really started ramping up.
But there is still one major drag on scientific advance: A lot of funding still goes into "private" (i.e., corporate) research. This is, scientifically speaking, usually a dead end, because the results of such research is kept private, and as of with the guilds of old, it isn't available for others to build on. The legal system cooperates in this, by prosecuting people who get access to private research results and try to build on it. In recent years, this has been happening more and more in the US, as the corporate world consolidates its control over the government and determines how most research is funded. Some universities also contribute to the problem, by claiming ownership of research results when they can and keeping it secret (or usable only under high license fees). I've read a few predictions that useful American research may be ending now, as the corporate world takes most of it private. And it's curious to see the publishers of scientific journals jumping in to block the advent of cheap open publication via the Internet.
Anyway, at least according to these histories, we should be supporting the open-publication people, because they're the ones pushing for more of what really made Western science the success it has been. If we really want Science to continue to improve our lives, we should be pushing for full access to all research results.
(And people have pointed out that the Internet is an example of the same phenomenon. It hasn't succeeded because it's such a great network. The IP/UDP/TCP/DNS/SMTP/HTTP/... protocols aren't all that good, actually. They're good enough to do the job, but anyone who knows them can tell you lots of ways to improve them. The reason for the Internet's success is mostly that all the specs have been published openly from the start. Anyone can download them for free, read them and implement them without legal restrictions. This gave the Internet a huge advantage over other privately-developed protocols that were often technically better but weren't available to any developer that was curious.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Ah, I forgot: in a grant application budget you can (and should, these days) have an item for "publication cost". I.e., the money you expect to pay for publishing your results.
America, Home of the Brave.