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Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban
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."
Claim that your physics thesis uncovers corruption in the Bush administration and pass it on to Wikileaks!
Three Squirrels
I find it outrageous that some journals are still charging the authors AND the subscribers. As a subscriber I am willing to pay for quality but then don't charge the authors.
At least in linguistics, there's a few scholars who just keep submitting the same research to journal after journal and collection after collection, just rewriting the article each time. If that's tolerated, why isn't putting the information on Wikipedia?
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). And I don't know any academics who would tolerate that (especially since the vast majority of academic journals don't pay you to publish your article and many articles lead on to books). Is academic physics THAT different?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Quantum Wikipedia is of immeasurable quality.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Just stop publishing in those journals and create your own. The barriers to entry are pretty low to set up an on-line publication, and even dead tree publishing of scientific papers isn't that expensive.
If any of these journals lose even a fraction of the scientists submitting material in favor of a more-open competitor, then the journal loses, not the scientists.
And never, ever, under any circumstances even consider thinking of assigning copyright to anyone.
Why would you pay to read an article in a journal if that same information or report were available elsewhere? It is a case of self-preservation on the part of the journal to protect itself from competition.
The internet has dramatically changed how information is accessible, and journals must respond to this new paradigm. The idea of a journal still plays an important role - by providing a process of peer review and editing for quality - but it seems the days of paying for paper copies and journals holding sole copyright of individual articles are waning.
Finally, on a related issue, as a taxpayer, why should I have to pay to read about research that I already supported through my tax dollars?
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.
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.
The people who publish scientific journals have been mining a lucrative seam for years.
Now, just as with music and video, they see their business model, and fat associated monopoly rents, being threatened.
Just as with the music and video industries, their efforts to stop the rot so far have been risible.
Their case has even less merit since, unlike the music and video inductries, the original authors of the works:
1. Have usually already been paid for their work, and
2. Actively want it be distributed as widely and freely as possible
Indeed, since a lot of (published) science is paid for by our taxes, one could argue 'the public' already owns it / the right to read it freely.
The argument that reputable journals provide a robust peer-review function withers somewhat in the light of many recent scandals that have 'slipped through the net'. The comparison with 'many eyes' from open source sprngs to mind. How long before something really poor or inaccurate is challenged on Wikipedia? Minutes?
Still, that's enough analogies - better stop before I try and slip in a car one, too...
More discussion on topic here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/Eisen.htm
I've published in PRL, back in the 90's. Basically what happened around then was that physicists were some of the earliest adopters of the internet and the web, and as soon as those tools became available, physicists started making their papers available to their colleagues for free in digital form. They still usually referred to them as "preprints," but in fact they'd still be sending them out after the paper had been accepted by the journal, the copyright transfer had been signed, and the paper had come out in print. Also in that era, arxiv.org was set up to archive preprints systematically. For decades now, arxiv has been a vital, ubiquitous part of the infrastructure of physics research; if arxiv is illegal, then I guess every single working physicist in the world is breaking the law every single working day of their career, because that's how much it gets used. The whole thing was sort of a blindingly obvious application for the internet. As an academic, what you care about is getting your research out there so that people know about it -- that's what builds your career. Nobody ever saw any conflict between the fact that (a) you assigned the copyright to the journal, and (b) you were still giving away copies. You might be able to argue that there was no legal conflict, because fair use applied, but realistically everybody saw it as a nonissue, because it was your own work you were giving out, and the journals were nonprofit entities.
What PRL should really reconsider is its whole policy of demanding copyright transfers. All they really need is a license from the author. This is a case where the legalities have lagged a couple of decades behind real-world practices. PRL is the most prestigious journal to get your work published in, but I think they realize that they're essentially expendable at this point at an institution; the minute a sufficient number of physicists get sufficiently upset with them, print journals can find itself replaced rapidly by open-access journals.
Virtually all submissions to PRL are done in LaTeX format, so there is no cost associated with typesetting. All the referees, and nearly all the editors, are unpaid. The printed format is basically obsolete, and the prices charged to libraries are simply ridiculous. This is a classic case where you just have an ossified institution that refuses to change.
Find free books.
Policy on copyright does differ from field to field, but it is more a matter of the journal than the field. Some journals have enlightened practices, some do not. For example, the Royal Society, which is the UK equivalent of the publisher of Physical Review Letters, has a very enlightened policy, and lets you publish under a creative commons license and retain copyright. The American Physical Society has a far more outdated policy, which looks like it will finally change.
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.
I'm fairly high up in a non-science journal (law). In the past it was quite common to ask for a complete transfer [author would no longer own the copyright and journal would]. Most authors have increasingly become less and less comfortable with this. I imagine this is true in non-law journals especially as copyright has become a bigger issue, making authors aware of it.
My journal recently switched from such an outright transfer to something along the lines of an exclusive license for 1 year and license after [with attribution to us afterwards]. So basically we want to be the first to publish it and we don't want it to be anywhere for a limited period of time. I think something along these lines is fair. Obviously, its the authors work, but the journals do a ton of work. Authors don't just submit and then journals publish. The articles are edited intensely and all the citations are checked to make sure the author is quoting correctly and drawing correct conclusions. This process I guess would be different with science journals, but they have to get the article peer-reviewed and I imagine there still would be intensive editing, since often scientists are not the best writers or are foreign, which my journal deals with quite often [though I doubt that the articles will have 300-800 footnotes like non-science articles do].
Anyway, some type of middle ground needs to be reached. Obviously, the journal doesn't want the same article to be published in a different journal 2 months later (at least not without its permission). If an author simply takes the paper after its gone through the extensive editing process and posts it on Wikipedia or wherever, that takes away the incentive for anyone to subscribe and the process isn't free (well law journals are done by students for free usually, but not all are and there are still many costs). But I definitely support the author being able to post his article after a certain amount of time (in fact most authors have their articles as a "working paper" online before we publish it and we don't care).
I think the license approach works pretty well. Also, remember that whether the journal likes it or not there is "fair use" and the science itself is not copyrightable just the expression (though I doubt the author is going to want to write the same thing twice). "Fair use" is often difficult because huge corporations will sue anyway and that is expensive, but I doubt this would be the case with academic journals, which don't have that type of budget.
So I'd just like to dispel any myth that journals do nothing. It's a give and take relationship. Journals need good authors to exist and become more prestigious and get more subscribers. But authors need journals so they can become well published, and thus become tenured, respected in the field, and reach an audience.
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.