Scientist Must Pay to Read His Own Paper

Glyn Moody writes "Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, was lost for words when he found Oxford University Press's website demanded $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons license. As he writes, the journal in question was "selling my intellectual property, without my permission, against the terms of the license (no commercial use)." In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?"

Comments

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[eln]

Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it, he has a case against OUP (for violating the license), but he's not being "denied access to his own paper"

The summary states that his license stipulates no commercial use. Charging anything for the paper beyond your own costs for providing it (a nominal bandwidth and storage fee, perhaps) is commercial use. On the face of it, OUP is violating the license.

If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access

That's a great theory, but then you get every scientist posting his research to his blog. In scientific circles, the idea of "peer-reviewed" research is very important. If you are not publishing in a well known and widely-read journal, you are not likely to get a whole lot of your peers to even read the research much less try to duplicate your results. Without duplication, scientific results are damn near useless.

Yes, it would be nice if no publicly funded worker could ever hold any exclusive IP in their intellectual works. However, this would mean less intellectual work production by them. It's a tradeoff like any other.

Most academic types do the research for its own sake, not necessarily to make money directly from it. These people tend to make money by writing books about their research, conducting lectures on it, and using it on their resumes to get nice tenured positions. It's usually the universities that make all the money selling it to private industry.

Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC?

I would be surprised if they even read the license at all.

Re:So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[everphilski]

claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it.

Your journal submissions / Master's thesis will, regardless of whether you felt this was 'marketing material'. It is very important, if you are going to publish via any mainstream channel, and this includes masters thesis/doctoral dissertation, to consider the literature and cite, cite, cite. Failure to do so can lead to problems down the road, it is no joke.

The benefit of this is that you gain a better understanding of the state of the knowlege of the scientific community and you can better define and carve out for yourself a problem to tackle as a grad student. Uniqueness is important.