Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
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...
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.
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!
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.
I am sure that if he went in to see the library staff, they would be able to give him an Athens login account, and that would allow him to to read his article for free. These are free for any staff or student who is working at a UK university.
This seems to be more of an issue of central services not being informed of which journals they should be subscribing to.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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!
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
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
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.
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.
from TFA
But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access.
It all is a routine, until they are caught, in which case they say "oops". They better try this not on legal students who care.
Cleary they did not go by CC license, which makes "This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License." Thus they will have to pay Peter murray for copyright, and fast! I bet they have a standard fee for unlimited online relicencing....