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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?"
1) Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand. It just means that the author has permitted people to copy it without his explicit approval. He should still be able to get it from someone else who doesn't want to charge him. 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"; it's just that one of many authorized providers simply isn't providing it. (Am I being "denied access to Jane Austen" when website #2938093583 won't email her works to me for free?)
2) 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. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.
3) 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.
Oh, and
4) Why did OUP ever accept it if it were labled as CC?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The document is available to read as both text and pdf.
I understand his worrying, but to me the biggest WTF is:
He works for one Cambridge university, he published his document to its biggest rival (Oxford) and they expect US dollars for a totally English transaction.
I say, off with their heads.
liqbase
Can't he sue them for copyright infringement?
Well, why dont you try reading what the CC (no commercial benefit) means.
What right does Oxford have to copy his work? If they did not work out a deal with him or his university, they, by default use the CC license.
The CC license he chose has "No Commercial Use" clause. They used it for commercial use, thereby making void their usage of the CC for copyright.
They are in violation of Rust's copyright. Hmm... if Rust can prove they did it in spite of CC (no com use), he probably can get treble damages...
Treble damages = $48 * 3 * n
Big number. Good.
5) Unless he's careless about backups, he has a damn copy on his computer at home. He can read his paper for free.
But the real meat-and-potatoes is point #2. You chose to submit it to said journal. Live with the consequences. (I don't condemn publishing in journals - but they aren't the only method of getting the word out, and after submitting your article to a journal it certainly does not curtail you from sharing results with others via other avenues)
With that kind of attitude, we would still all be living in caves.
Research into quantum physics would have seemed useless with no market value when it was started. However, 50 years later, without that research, there would have been no transistors. How big is the semiconductor market today? 50 years before it even existed, no capitalist could have forseen the use of the research. There is a very good case for researching things that may have no market value for decades.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You can access the article from the OUP web site for free (CC-NL with attribution), and additionally it is available from PubMed Central at the NIH. I don't know how we got that popup asking him for money to use it in a classroom, but it is probably just a mistake. Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from asking you to pay for something that's free, if you're a sucker. Once again, the whole article is right there to read, with the CC license right at the top. BTW, OUP has both Open Access and non-open access journals, so I can see how a common document delivery system could get screwed up. Not that it should, but you could see how. Hopefully they will correct it, I've published Open Access and non-Open Access papers with OUP and they are pretty responsive on both the technical and editorial sides.
The open access model works as follows: "Open Access: Everything we publish is freely available online for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish." Pretty straight forward.
As an author you pay a small amount to support the publication of the journal - often smaller than the cost for color pages at a commercial journal, and then your work is freely available. These are high quality journals and are one important part of the free future of scientific publishing. The more people who make this choice, the more pressure there will be on the traditional journals to open up their content if they want to survive.
OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article
I have been dismayed (previous post: "Open Access") at the lack of commitment to OA by mainstream (primarily toll-access (TA)) publishers and have described this as a "systemic failure" of the industry. Here is another unacceptable lack of clarity and commitment from an Open Access journal from a major publisher. I had been investigating OUP's site for another reason (PRISM: Open Letter to Oxford University Press) and since I had published with them thought I would have a look at papers I had written ("I" and "my" include co-authors). This is what I found (screenshot):
The Image in the blog entry stating $48 cost
The electronic article is accompanied by a sidebar with "request permissions". I followed this and the result is shown above. The journal wishes to charge me 48 USD to:
* USE MY OWN ARTICLE
* ON WHICH I HOLD COPYRIGHT
* FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES (TEACHING)
The journal is therefore
* SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
* WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
* AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)
I am lost for words...
If this is - as I desperately hope - a genuine mistake then my criticism might seem harsh. But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access. And I hope that OUP can and will clarify and rectify the position. If, however, it is deliberate and that the publisher actually intends to charge readers and users for Open Access articles I shall reserve comment.
This is not a trivial point. The normal reader of a journal who wishes to re-use material has to navigate copyright constraints and restrictions on an all-too-frequent basis. Such a reader, especially if they were relatively unaware of Open Access could easily pay the journal for "permission to use an Open Access article for teaching". (Note that other charges are higher - to include my own article in a book I write would cost nearly 350 USD).
It is all indicative of an industry that simply isn't trying hard enough.
RECOMMENDATION:
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLES ON PUBLISHERS' WEB PAGES SHOULD NEVER BE ACCOMPANIED BY RIGHTSLINK OR OTHER PERMISSION MATERIAL. INSTEAD THE PUBLISHER SHOULD PRO-ACTIVELY POINT OUT THE NATURE OF OA AND ENSURE THAT THE READER AND RE-USER IS FULLY AWARE OF THEIR RIGHTS.
After all, the author has paid for this...
This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under open issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The page on OUP's website that the Rust is on about is located here. As you can plainly see on the right-hand of the screen this document is available, FOR FREE, in PDF format. In fact, here's a direct link to said PDF on OUP's website.
What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.
My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.
Rust is really making a lot of fuss over nothing.
I'm guessing you've never seen an academic's desk before...
Citation:
Holliday et al. (2007) MACiE (Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes): novel tools for searching catalytic mechanisms. Nucleic Acids Research, 35, Database issue D515-D520. DOI link
He's right that clicking on the right and getting a quick quote for reproducing the entire article as part of a course pack (print and/or electric) is non zero... BUT, producing a course pack doesn't allways equate to non-commerial in my mind.
It might part of university course, in which case Peter Murray-Rust seems justified in taking calling this non-commerial (and therefore free under the CC licence used).
However, the course-pack could be part of a commercial training course for members of the pharma industry - in which case the end user would have to pay the copyright holders.
The bottom of the quick quote page even EXPLAINS this (cropped in his screen shot):
If the item you are seeking permission to re-use is labeled OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE then please note that non-commercial reuse of it is according to the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license. Permission only needs to be obtained for commercial use and can be done via Rightslink. If you have any queries about re-use of content published as part of the Oxford Open program, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
What's the big fuss about?
In order to get published, you have to sign off on Oxford Journal's License to Publish:
here
and I quote:
"You agree that OUP may include the Article in an "open access" version of the Journal subject to payment of the relevant 'open access' fee or submission of a valid fee-waiver form."
You have to sign this piece of paper to submit the article. Obviously, he (or a coauthor?) did, so from my read he gave them explicit permission to seek payment.
"his research is mostly useless from a market perspective".
That's why research is peer-reviewed y scientists and not marketers. If the market was to decide what's worthy of researching, only narrow areas of immediate commercial interest will be funded. Basic research such as math that's useful to do other research is not immediately useful market-wise, but necessary for overall progress of human knowledge.
let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?
That's already the case in the pharmaceuticals industry. Supposedly independent academic research has long ago been purchased by drug manufacturers in exchange for the Dean showing a great bottom line.
Has the cost of medicine in general gone down?
Is there more access to the medical system?
What about drugs that cure diseases in countries that can't afford to pay? Do they get the same amount of research as erectile disfunction and mood disorder research?
Please abandon this kind of thinking. A market-like system creates as many problems as the one it replaces. Only it's more virulent, harms consumers a multitude of ways and benefits a very, very select few. As Microsoft and AT&T have proven, even regulation doesn't shut down a monopoly.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
I'm guessing you've never seen an academic's desk before...
Yes, I have... And they didn't have much trouble finding stuff in it.
how long until
Look, Prof. Rust, I hate to break this to you, but you are representing one of the two universities which pretty much singlehandedly produce the lawyers, politicians and civil servants of this country. All productive work that you do goes ultimately toward bolstering the establishment. And the establishment likes the kind of crap exploitative behaviour displayed by publishers.
If you don't like it - and I wish more scientists and mathematicians didn't - you would distance yourself from Oxbridge, and do what religious dissenters had to do prior to C20: set up their own Universities. Sound daft? Early C19 France's post-revolutionary applied bent brought work from Laplace, Legendre, Galois, Cauchy, et al. publishing in Liouville's Journal de Mathematiques - where the founder was also a prominent author; Germany supplied us with Gauss, Dirichlet, Jacobi, et al. publishing in Crelle's Journal, a lovechild of Crelle and Abel's relationship with the new abstract mathematics; where was Cambridge? Well, Woodhouse's attempts to advance on tutoring of Newton's fluxions by introducing Lagrange's algebra was a miserable failure, the most advanced mathematical textbook was a translation of Lacroix that preceded Cauchy's work at the Ecole in the 1820s, Frend was back to poking fun at the concept of negative numbers (400 years too late, buddy!) for the lack of physical association - and that was before he was thrown out for being OMG a unitarian. Despite De Morgan's "science of symbols" trying to drag Cambridge kicking and screaming to C19 Continental levels of progress (and, hell, the of abstract symbolism was well ranted about by Leibniz 100 years prior), he similarly received the boot for being an OMG heretic!
The sad thing is that in the first half of C19, England was the backward exception; today, the spirit of revolutionising society by broadening participation in scientific advancement is absent from pretty much the whole of Europe. But I repeat myself. If the best academics, following Laplace, would poke their "spirit of the infinitesimal" into the power-lustful eyes of the contemporary Napoleons, sacrificing a little research time to strengthen the power of the productive as opposed to the administrative, we'd see some progress. (N.B. yes, US readers, I know, putting control in the hands of the workers is socialism and in the hands of the owners of the presses is capitalism blah blah. Whatever. The cold war's over, enough of the witch trials already.)
And no, putting your faith in a profit-making entity like Google is not the answer, for the businessman giveth and the businessman taketh away; though I expect Google will court academics looking for a less oppressive way to manage the peer review and publishing process.
The authors write the papers, and do not receive any pay from the journal for that. The journal editors then forward the paper to reviewers. The reviewers are volunteers, not paid by the journal. Then the editors forward the paper (if accepted) to a typesetter, and it is published.
The authors and the reviewers are academics, who basically give their time to the journals. Their salaries come from government grants, from university funds (which come from tuition), and to some extent from corporate collaborations.
The salaries of the editors and typesetters are paid by the journal subscription charges. The subscriptions come primarily from academic libraries in universities or government research institutes. (Which are, again, funded by government grants and university funds.)
So, a very large percent of the money flowing into the journal comes from public funds (taxes). Significantly, the peer reviewers are volunteers, with their actual salaries coming largely from public funds. In a very real sense, our tax dollars are indeed paying for vetting the paper. The "valuable service" of which you speak is not performed by the journal, but by the academics (who do not benefit in any way from the toll-access that the journals impose).
does private ownership of intellectual property hinder scientific research? Should publicly funded science be required to release findings using creative commons (or other such) license? Does it bother us that a large chunk of DNA research IP is help by private parties?
Power to the Penguin!
Nucleic Acids Research is an open journal, which charges the authors a publication fee. It's supposed to be free for reading by their own statement. Thus, this is not some special case of open access submission to a regular journal. The charges window is from OA's regular, pay-for-access journals. It's obviously a simple mistake by OA's web site. Write email to AO's admin for access at openaccess@oxfordjournals.org and let them know, then give them adequate time to fix it. Journals, even open access, even web-based, are not fast action organizations and OA is, in my experience, one of the slower ones.
As for a claim of "my" article from one of a dozen or so authors (the complaint being about 6th or 8th among them) as well as the complaint about not being able to read it (you've got a copy, don't you?) instead of the more accurate "charge being applied to OUR open access article on THEIR open access journal web site", criminy, take a trank and some deep breaths. You're having a tantrum and it's making you spout extravagant and incorrect claims. It took me all of 5 minutes, including reading the blog posts, to find the contact point for OA's open access admin. Contact the right people and let them fix it.
FWIW, NIH has been working to get any publication supported by NIH funding to be made available for free (at least to US sites, as having been supported by US tax money) via National Library of Medicine's PubMed (nee MEDLINE), no matter what journal it's in. NASA has had good luck making their stuff available through their own channels since they won't sign over copyright to journals because they're publicly supported, and NIH is following their example through their own distribution system. And that's working with copyright snatching pay-for journals. Open access journals are already open, and I haven't had this problem with non-OA open pubs, so it's obvious this is simply a bug in the OA system. It happens. They're not evil ogres out to steal "your" pub.
It might go faster if the first author made the contact with OA, but I doubt it since I doubt they intended for this to happen.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
One of the other dangers of state-funded research is that it gets politicized and distorted. Biotechnicians now have to deal with really weird and arbitrary rules about where their stem cells came from. And Yog-Sothoth help you, if you're in a government position and happen to notice a curious relationship between pollution and temperature: you better shut your mouth if you want to keep your job.
And yet, to restore integrity to publicly funded research, you have to tell the electorate, "Fuck you, I don't care what platform you voted for, we're going to spend your money on something you don't like. You say we're killing babies, I say a microscopic blob isn't a person. Don't agree with me? Well guess what, I hold the power and you will settle up with me on April 15." It's either a science disaster or a civics disaster: whoever wins, we lose.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html
Dr. Knuth has a stark and telling financial analysis for his journal in particular and its trend in relation to the marketplace in his letter to the Editorial board of the Elsevier journal of which he was a member. It led to the resignation of the entire editorial board and the formation of the ACM journal Transactions on Algorithms. It's a must read for the current discussion.
BTW: I just started back at school for my master's and the required orientation seminars include a segment from the librarians. The librarians emphasize the importance of searching the more expensive, private journals they pay for (Springer, etc.) claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it. The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us. It was disgusting. For the scientific community to break out of this media trap, we must reject this mentality, allow researchers to answer questions on research sources on ethical grounds, and ultimately make the decisions that Dr. Knuth and the JoA board made.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
" 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?"
? CMP=KNC-Google
Research is one thing. Rules and regulations you have to follow has taken the same road to being expensive. I needed to do some rewireing and wanted to comply with the National Electrical Code. In the past the book was under $20. Now it is expensive far beyond any publishing costs.
How would you feel if your town took published the standard your were required to follow to legally use the roads, but by the way, the standard drivers manual with the new revisions is now $150
http://www.constructionbook.com/electrical-codes/
http://www.constructionbook.com/nec-code-2005/
Cost of materials for the job $160
Permit and inspection $192
Cost of the book $159.95 for the 6th edition.
This makes the latest Harry Potter hard bound edition look like a bargain compared to this spiral bound paperback. The price of the book is not in any way related to the publishing cost.
By the way, I passed inspection on first try. I saved paying an electrician $1500.00. I skipped buying the book. I Googled the discussion on the changes proposed to the standard to learn of the changes that I needed to comply.
It's important legally such as needing to know the legal distance you have to stay back from a responding fire truck. It would suck to have to pay $150 for a drivers manual. Why the heck is the NEC, a required standard selling for over $150?
Can anybody justify the reasoning for the overpricing of this book by a full order of magnitude? The price of the regulations should not be 1/3 of the cost of a large rewire job.
The truth shall set you free!
What really begs the question is, where the hell does that money go, if not to the author of the article?
Depends. Maintaining an editing, peer review, production and publication system does cost money, print or online. Aside from that, there's a distinction between journals put out by non-profit organizations (like the American Chemical Society) and for-profit publishers (like Elsevier).
The societies often use journal publication as a moneymaker to support other efforts, which are often philanthropic. ACS, for instance, does a lot to support chemistry education K-12 and other efforts as well. I believe many of them also give discounts to academic institutions. On the other hand, the for-profit publishers are in the business of making money, and charge what the market will bear. For that reason, many researchers prefer to use society-based publishers.
While I agree with your general points, I think there is a valid role for the government in providing services that cannot (or that we don't want) be limited to only those who have paid for them. In economics terms, those goods for while the 'free-rider problem' is hard to solve.
I think GPS falls into this category. Putting the GPS constellation up was very expensive. Putting it up there, and also building in some capability that made the signal only useful to those who had paid a subscription fee, would have been harder still. (And with a subscription service, I doubt it ever would have become popular enough to pay for itself. I own three GPS units, but I doubt I'd own any if they required a subscription service.) So rather than having no GPS system at all, or a crippled one, you accept that it's something that's useful to society in general and pay for it out of taxes, and allow everyone to use it.
Obviously this is a dangerous game -- it's easy for corrupt politicians to expand the scope of government if not kept in check constantly -- but there are lots of situations where it's the most efficient and effective solution to a problem, to use public funding.
The current scientific journal system is beyond corrupt, and needs to die. However, privatizing all scientific research would be a disaster. First, although you would think that corporations (not having any pesky biological lifespan) would take the long view and invest in basic research, for the most part, they don't. The market favors next-quarter gains, not decades- or centuries-long strategy.
Second, it wouldn't be very healthy to have the majority of our scientific knowledge locked up by corporations who have no interest in it except insofar as it can be monetized or used to gain a competitive advantage. (Hard to put together unified theories when IBM knows half of what's known in a field, Microsoft knows the other half, and they don't speak to each other.) We suffer as a whole, if new discoveries aren't made public. The current academic system (where the currency is basically prestige, rather than cash) encourages dissemination of new discoveries. A more market-driven one would not.
The market economy is a great thing, but there are some areas in which the outcomes it produces may be non-optimal from the point of view of people actually living in the market. Solving the free-rider problem, either when it's not possible to charge for a good, or you don't want to charge for a good, is one of the legitimate functions of a democratic government.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Because there cannot be significant damages for violating the license of free material, your chance of actually extracting any sort of retribution is minimal.
What you should do from now on is dual license the material. CC for not-for-profit duplication, and explicitly state a royalty system for commercial use. Charge $1 for every copy sold. When a company violates your terms you can sue for real damages. And in most jurisdictions it works as multiplier so you can sue for far more than they have actually failed to pay.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
could this catergory fall under the foia?research paid by taxes. people have the right to know
The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us.
:-)
No, the librarian was passing along the sad truth, not corporate spin. The corporation did not create this situation, they merely leverage it to make a profit, as with any other trend. As noted, the academics have created and brought this upon themselves. Academics are sometimes like pop celebrities, they want to see their name in the *right* places, the fashionable high status places.
As you begin your study and research be prepared to take part in the big academic pissing contest. Your research will most likely be *directed* by advisors away from your pure interests and spun in a more marketable and fashionable direction. Welcome to the herd.
Scientific publishing has been a big business for some time. If scientists only wanted to publish their work then they would submit their papers to the Public Library of Science (PLOS) or to other free (of charge) publishing services. But they want fame, to advance their careers, and publishing in journals such as Cell, Science, or Nature is expensive; and access to scientific papers in those same journals is also expensive. But since scientists don't pay for those privileges out of their own pockets*, price doesn't seem to matter to them -- at least not as much as "fame".
____
*next time you donate to, say, a cancer research charity, remember that some of the money spent on "research" is actually spent on publishing articles in expensive journals
I phoned the ACM and got it sorted out. As you see now on their site, it's freely-available. The ACM was reasonable and reacted quickly. That isn't always the case.
Because the whole fucking point of science is that it studies the pointless stuff too. If science was funded merely by the free market, science funding would be skewed towards researching practical stuff, which would leave abstract theoretical stuff that doesn't produce practical results for hundreds of years forced to beg for money, and that would force science to become hopelessly myopic. Science is not merely the servant of the economy, doing the grunt work of pure research so that people can go invent and create great things, science is an end in itself.
Furthermore, "stealing from people" to fund science is more justified than "stealing from people" to fund police. Providing a police service only benefits some people; criminals for instance are harmed by police, (or, for that matter, by people defending themselves independently) and that's not nice. Science, to contrast, benefits everyone, whether they directly partake of science or not.
Perhaps government funding allows science to be a bit less efficient by allowing them to get money even if they don't get results. BUT IF SO, THAT IS A GOOD THING. Science is by design inefficient. You look at some data, you create a hypothesis, and then you test it over and over again until you find out that it's false. Even the most obvious theories might end up being wrong, and thus they should be tested. This is insanely inefficient, but fuck efficiency. Science is the most important thing in the universe.
Also, the free market can only give us what we want, since it's based on voluntary transactions between people. It is fairly often the case that as science advances, we find out that something we didn't really think we wanted is, in fact, fucking awesome. In order for life to get better, we need the government to "steal people's money" and invest in crapshoots.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor