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Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban

Posted by kdawson on from the mine-mine-mine dept.

I don't believe in imaginary property writes "The flagship physics journal Physical Review Letters doesn't allow authors to submit material to Wikipedia, or blogs, that is derived from their published work. Recently, the journal withdrew their acceptance of two articles by Jonathan Oppenheim and co-authors because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia and the Quantum Wikipedia. Currently, many scientists 'routinely do things which violate the transfer of copyright agreement of the journal.' Thirty-eight physicists have written to the journal requesting changes in their copyright policies, saying 'It is unreasonable and completely at odds with the practice in the field. Scientists want as broad an audience for their papers as possible.' The protest may be having an effect. The editor-in-chief of the APS journals says the society plans to review its copyright policy at a meeting in May. 'A group of excellent scientists has asked us to consider revising our copyright, and we take them seriously,' he says."

11 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field by rangek · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've published to professional journals (as a academic historian) before, and I've never had to surrender copyright to the journal (agreement was strictly for publishing rights).

    For chemistry:

    The undersigned, with the consent of all authors, hereby transfers, to the extent that there is copyright to be transferred, the exclusive copyright interest in the above cited manuscript, including the published version in any format (subsequently called the "work"), to the American Chemical Society....

    From http://pubs.acs.org/copyright/forms/copyright.pdf

    For physics:

    Copyright to the above-listed unpublished and original article submitted by the above author(s), the abstract forming part thereof, and any subsequent errata (collectively, the "Article") is hereby transferred to the American Physical Society (APS)...

    From http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.pdf, which interestingly enough wouldn't let me cut-and-paste without using a hacked version of xpdf. :P

  2. USENIX just made access to its proceedings free by al1984 · · Score: 3, Informative

    PhysRevLet is behind the times. The trend is for open access. This week, USENIX, the computing systems association and sponsor of many major conferences, is making access to all its published papers and conference proceedings free to the world. This blog has details.

  3. This is stupid. by danielsfca2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Okay, the blog thing seems like something that might make sense, but Wikipedia, WTF?

    Publishing information to WP based on your own work would probably be original research according to WP. Which WP doesn't allow.

    Secondly, WP doesn't allow copyrighted work like journals to be posted verbatim on the site--even IF the author grants explicit permission signed in blood and double-notarized to have the material published there too. For WP, it's basically 100% Free or no deal. So, the ONLY way this material could be posted on Wikipedia and stay up for more than 7 minutes with the WP Copyright Police would be if the author released it under GFDL. Which no one wants to do with anything, especially if it's their livelyhood. (I could see licensing a work of mine to Wikipedia, a donation to a nonprofit, but it would piss me off to see that work all over retarded AdSense farms that (legally) steal the content for profit.

    And finally, since just posting full text of journal articles is not what WP does (or allows), this whole discussion is stupid. They don't accept full-text of newspaper columns, magazines, or your diary either. It's not a knowledge collective, it's a Freer-than-thou encyclopedia.

    What WP does allow is citing these journal articles, and that's something that even our ludicrous current copyright laws has yet to forbid.

    Though you can be sure that when citing copyrighted works does get forbidden WP will be the first to knuckle under and ban it, because they have shown in the past that they have no balls to stand up against unjust and overly-broad-interpreted IP laws, for example their complete denial that fair use rights exist.

    1. Re:This is stupid. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you read the original article (not the New Scientist piece, but the statement of the authors), it is not that they want to put their work on Wikipedia. This is just used as an example -- they want to release their work under a creative commons license. Mostly for other specialized services. I guess this may include the Quantum Wikipedia.

  4. Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field by JoeRandomHacker · · Score: 3, Informative
    For Computer Science:

    Copyright to the above work (including without limitation, the right to publish the work in whole or in part in any and all forms of media, now or hereafter known) is hereby transferred to the ACM (*for Government work, to the extent transferable -see Part B below) effective as of the date of this agreement, on the understanding that the work has been accepted for publication by ACM. From http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_form.html
  5. Re:Wikipedia:No_Original_Research by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's like how slashdot always tells people who were libeled to just fix the article. You're not supposed to edit information about yourself. Libel is covered by the biographies of living persons policy (BLP), and the conflict of interest policy (COI) defers to BLP where they conflict. From COI:

    Editors who may have a conflict of interest are allowed to make certain kinds of non-controversial edits, such as:

    2. Deleting content that violates Wikipedia's biography of living persons policy.
  6. Re:Some journals are still milking both ends by Raul654 · · Score: 3, Informative

    (Speaking as someone who has reviewed conference submissions) For some good quality (tier 2) computer engineering conferences, only about one in five submissions is accepted. (At tier 1 - ISCA and PLDI, it's like 5%) Often times papers are reject not because they are bad or horribly flawed, but simply that there are better (more important, better conducted, more thorough) papers available. High submission fees discriminate against these papers, and especially against research groups that do not have as much fundings as others.

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
  7. claiming? by l2718 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It sounds to me like more people trying to claim intellectual property of something that they did not come up with themselves.

    Wrong. The journal is not "claiming" any "intellectual property". The journal is saying that, if you want them to publish your work (which no-one is forcing you to do) then you must assign them the copyright. If you don't like it, publish in a different journal. Since the journal makes money from subscription, they don't want you to benefit from their prestige by getting the paper accepted, and then turning around and posting the content somewhere else so no-one has to subscribe to the journal. Also note that in any case we're only talking about copyright, and hence the text of the paper, not the scientific content.

    That said, I think the policy is silly. First of all, APS journals will already accept material that's already been posted on the arXiv (compare with Science and Nature which only take stuff that's never been presented before, even in a seminar talk). All the journal needs is a license from the authors. There's nothing wrong with the authors giving the journal an exclusive license to publish the article journal-style, as long as the authors retain the ability to post works derived from the article in other fora.

  8. Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field by san · · Score: 2, Informative

    On the other hand, the APS journals are OK with you putting your version of your paper on the Arxiv preprint server; they even allow submission to their journals by Arxiv article number -- they will then download your manuscript from Arxiv and send it to the editors.

    I've always been under the impression that the copyright they hold is only to the specific, printed, version they publish, not to any manuscripts you have.

  9. Re:Some journals are still milking both ends by kharchenko · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know of any major scientific journal that charges for submitting an article. As far as I know all of them charge you only if the article has been accepted for publication (i.e. deemed to be non-"junk"), which nullifies your argument.

  10. You don't need to pay to publish! by feranick · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is a lot of confusion here, and even worst, people don't seem to know what they are talking about... In order to publish your work in Physical Review journals you don't have to pay a dime. It's free to submit. You only need to pay if you want color images in the printed version (it's free for Online only color images).

    The idea of refunds, or charging for publication as a way to select publication is just non-sense. You don't need to refund something you don't pay in first place. Selection of papers is done through peer-review, a hard enough process the get through, that money isn't really the issue.