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U.C. System and Springer Agree To CC-Licensed Journal Articles
NeoSkink writes "The University of California and Springer Science+Business Media have reached an agreement to provide open access for articles submitted by UC-affiliated authors. In a press release, the UC writes: 'Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution, Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.'"
This is pretty big. Basically the other major publishing houses will need to come up with similar agreements. Otherwise a good chunk of papers produced by research done in the UC system will be submitted to Springer journals first.
This guy's the limit!
And just in case no-one can see his point, consider that pharmaceutical researchers will be required to purchase a different license to use medical research published under a CC-non-commercial license to actually make drugs that save lives. In a way, this announcement is a step backwards, as previously there was no explicit non-commercial requirement on scientific papers. In fact, it was assumed to be the opposite.
How we know is more important than what we know.
No, actually non-commercial in this context means that you can't copy the articles themselves and make money off doing that, not that the information contained within those articles cannot be applied to commercial ventures.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Is there some easy way I could become "UC-Affiliated" without actually having to become a student/professor there and thus get my papers published under an open license?
It has always bothered me that the papers I publish get locked up in "digital libraries" and inaccessible to most of the world when a major point of academia is spreading ideas. In the past Springer has been particularly egregious in this regard. Maybe this will be a step in the right direction.
IANAL, and I haven't read more than your post and a couple of others. But I interpret that "publicly perform" refers to "perform" in the theatrical sense. As in you can't go to a conference and present this paper in public. As for the concepts described in the paper, I don't see how anything other than patents can bind you not to use them once they're public.
To do list for Windows
I'm glad to see this happening. Academic publishing has terrible practices. To get published in most journals you have to join the society that publishes the journal or subscribe to the journal. Then you have to sign over your rights to your article. In effect, you have to pay them to take your intellectual property rights!
Then, the journal sells your article to a company that sells access to universities. However, the scam is that, as academics, we are at least in part getting paid to do research. So the university is paying me to write papers and then it has to turn around and pay someone else to get access to that very same article! (Of course they are getting access to lots more articles than just those published by their own university)
Now, at least in the humanities, it is common to publish some articles and then turn those articles into a book. But wait, to get those articles published I had to give away my intellectual property rights. So if I want to make any use of that article, I have to get permission from the journal. Now, permission is generally given without any problem but call me crazy but I would rather not rely on someone's "generosity" in order to use my own work.
Finally, at least in the humanities, a lot of journals are ran by societies which are at least theoretically organized by academics themselves in order to advance the field that they are devoted to. So why is it that a society organized by us and for us is taking our intellectual property? When I raised this issue to the editor of one such journal he was shocked and refused to even entertain the notion of allowing us to keep our intellectual property because "that's how the journal makes money." This isn't to imply that academic publishers are sitting on piles of money or anything that kind of attitude doesn't really seem to have the right attitude to me.
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