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Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?
Dr_Ken writes to mention recent coverage of a Harvard Cyber-Law study on Techdirt that analyzes the uses of copyright in the academic world. Some are claiming that the applications of copyright in academia are stifling and that we should perhaps go so far as to abolish copyright in the academic world entirely. "I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they're forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That's bad for everyone."
The biggest arguments here seem to apply to academics no more than to any other field. Why allow stifling of creativity elsewhere?
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YES!
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I was always under the impression that you could, say cite the other work in your work and make comparison's and contrasts to the other work.
Example: If someone came up with a theory with supporting test results and ten universities duplicated those test results - proving the theory - then those ten universities could publish their results all the while citing the originating test results.
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It shouldn't be abolished, but fair use should no longer be restricted. What these publishers get away with should be completely illegal under fair use provisions. Authors not being allowed to use their own works? And charging 75 cents a page for articles published in coursepaks is unconscionable, especially considering there is no economic loss to republishing in this form; it's not like the students in these courses would run out and pick up the September 1982 issue of Political Science Quarterly at the local bookstore if they didn't get this free version from their teacher. (I understand why publishers want copy shops to fork something over, but there should be an agreed upon reasonable limit in the area of a penny a page rather than a blank check, which is the way it currently is).
Actually what would be nice to see would be that the copyright stays with the creator in all cases. Allowing the journals to acquire the copyright to this work in the first place is a bizarre economic fiction anyway; when the author can't even cite their own studies due to this fiction, it has been taken to its absurd logical conclusion. But the proposal here is unworkable without some kind of objective standard of what constitutes "academic work," and that's not likely to happen.
As long as others can copyright things, the public domain will always be susceptible to looting. The appropriate fix is to choose a *license* that makes sense.
Citing your above work as reference to my own, hasn't that been going on for hundreds of years?
In my other life, I eat cats.
It's just another option. You don't have to sell your copyright. Why do scientists sell their copyright to journals? Because journals pay for it. Without copyright, journals would not pay for scientific articles. Well, simply don't sell your work and you can have that result right now, without changing any laws. You keep your copyright, the journal keeps its money.
But the "of Academic Works" needs to be removed.
"I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim."
Pretty sad when an academic doesn't learn the relevant details of copyright as pertains to their work.
You can't copyright a result, only the work that contains it. The results can always be expressed and referred to elsewhere. The ideas can be expressed elsewhere as long as they are not presented in the same words (apply 'fair use' here; this is academics after all). The situation as stated pertains to academic research. When done commercially, or in an academic setting for a commercial entity, the copyright goes to the owner, not the researcher. Cross that line and you're in far deeper waters than mere copyright infringement.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
MIT is encouraging every faculty member to deposit an electronic copy of their published papers into a free library server. And MIT is providing free software and hardware resources to do this. MIT is one of 50 universities that now do this, but made the biggest splash announcing it earlier this year.
However a faculty can opt out a paper if a journal absolutely refuses making a paper open as some do. A more common compromise is the journal has electronic rights for 12 months with faculty rights after that. All in the name of financing the journal.
Some are claiming
/.
Can't wait to meet those Some! They seem to appear in every propaganda story about copyright on
I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment
Really?! Where did you hear of them? Overheard conversation on a bus? National Enquirer letters to the editor? Can't wait to find out!
That's bad for everyone.
Wow, thanks! I finally get it now!
From TFA: admittedly, I'm already a strong believer in the harm done by copyright in many instances
Impartial source too! This story really makes me excited! Let's overthrow those evil copyright laws right now. Rise up comrades, you've nothing to lose but your chains!!!
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
In engineering there is a quiet underground of folks who are smart enough to never patent the really good stuff. If the really good stuff gets patented, you are screwed out of using it once your MBA overlords Layoff/RIF/Right Size/Down Size/Work Force Manage/etc you into working elsewhere.
One of the things I found unpersuasive in Professor Shavell's article was the following:
Furthermore, universities should not face great difficulties in financing publication fees, for they would no longer have to purchase journal subscriptions or books.
I am wholly unpersuaded that the savings of having to purchase a small number journal subscriptions would in any meaningful way offset the costs of having to pay for printing (for physical distribution) and bandwidth (for digital distribution).
I don't disagree with the article in general, but he does a lot of hand-waving about the costs of this proposed transformation. Just something to keep in mind.
The original article violates copyrights on the Webster Dictionary. Please refrain from using words in future articles.
What would replace the current system, exactly? Free peer review coupled with nearly-free publishing? Take a look at the PLoS, which is invaluable. However, it also does *not* have peer review because that requires maintaining a specific board of reviewers and at least one editor. This is why you can find unscientific trash like Intelligent Design 'papers' in there along with the world-class science. While I think the best situation for science would be great peer review with completely open access, I just don't see it working well without a huge amount of peer review volunteering, which could arguably switch the incentives for (peer-reviewer) performance completely around. If someone finds a solution to this, it would be great, but it's a dangerous experiment to simply throw out copyright in academia, particularly science.
Many academics are rewarded by publishing in journals with top reputations. It takes time to develop alternative, low-cost, online journals that use better copyright regimes AND have a solid reputation. Creating a new journal with a decent rep takes years (best case 2-3, to get indexed and earn a healthy impact factor, and likely much, much longer). Worthwhile goal, but progress will be slow.
The example in the summary could be easily handled by disallowing the transfer of copyright ownership for academic materials - making the originator always the owner with the option of allowing others to use their work.
We have to remember the purpose of IP law - when it ceases to protect creators of intellectual works, it is no longer serving its purpose.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim.
They can cite them, i.e. "we have previously found [REF]", without infringing anything, so I think you have gotten mixed up there. What they cannot necessary do without infringing is reproduce data/figures without gaining copyright exemption. It can be handled two ways, both involve citing the earlier work along with the reproduction to be absolutely sure that you are nobody thinks you are plagiarising yourself, and if you want to be proper about it then you can get a copyright exemption (which happens all the time for review articles). It will almost always be granted, but it is just a bit of a hassle to get sometimes. These points don't negate any discussion about the moral or ethical repercussions of being forced to sign over copyright - that is different - but practically there are no great repercussions.
I have had to sign away copyright on work I have done, and it does feel wrong. But on the other hand the journals are relatively relaxed about the situation, and you don't see legalise copyright warnings being posted to anyone. If journals annoy authors then said authors don't publish in those journals so they have to be careful. If academic establishments stopped paying subscriptions to journals then it might also be different - as at that point all of the copyrighted works the publishers hold become a rather more active asset to exploit since they may not be making any money from subscriptions (in some open access models for example).
Sup dawg we herd you liek citing copyrighted academic works so we put a citation in your citation so you can cite while you citing!
Basically journals get academics to edit and review for free, to write for free, they force you to sign over copyright, and they charge you to access your own paper. Generally university libraries fork over tons of money to get a campus wide subscription to each and every journal. Everyone has to publish or perish (even masters students). Most of the research is probably government and publicly funded anyways. Anyone see anything wrong with this??
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We have to remember the purpose of IP law - when it ceases to protect creators of intellectual works, it is no longer serving its purpose.
I think that should be "We have to remember the purpose of IP law - when it ceases to encourage the production and publication of intellectual works, it is no longer serving its purpose."
Not that this changes your conclusion significantly... the journal would get a non-exclusive license to the work, rather than copyright, with possibly some embargoed period of exclusivity for the work as a whole. Yes, I know that sounds like it's recreating part of 18th century copyright law as a contract between the author and the publisher, but that may be what's necessary.
One of the leading science journals Nature just had an editorial requesting that scientific societies establish policies on tweeting an blogging of talks at conferences. They recommend either complete openess or complete closure. Much of this now done by tech-savy excited grad students chatting among themselves. But some scientific societies consider this a form of competitive pre-publication, particularly in biosciences where commercial speed is important.
This concern is not new. I've been at conferences in the pre-digital era where sneaky people tape record the talk and film photograph every slide. New technology in every cellphone make this much easier to do.
Maybe they should make a special copyright for academic works. Allow the schools to create a copyright but its a limited copyright of sorts. People could freely use it, reference it or copy it for their personal use but if they ever want to sell it they then have to talk to the institution that holds the copyright for it and get permission or setup a deal.
Personally though im of the mind that if something was created in the academic world it should be fair game for everyone not looking to make money because our tax money partially paid for it. Anything innovated for profit from said copyright should at least acknowledge and pay something to the original inventor. You take public funds and you'd better be willing to give that item, idea or whatever to those that funded it. The public. They couldn't of made it otherwise.
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I would think that repeating an experiment falls into the category of "Scientific Rigor" -- if academics are unwilling to their experiments (albeit this seems for the wrong reasons), they are in the wrong job...
Most people doing experiments don't have unlimited resources to redo something they did right the first time. As far as the "rigor" part goes, the idea is to get *other people* to do the experiment...having the same people do it over again doesn't really do much to show reproducibility.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Why abolish? Why not simply shorten?
Originally copyright was 7 years plus 7 years (if you filed for an extension). That might work better than either abolition or the current situation.
Or how about logarithmic payments? Free for the first five years, $1,000 for the next five, $1,000,000 for the next five (or whatever).
Black and white debates, all or nothing, strike me as mimicking our current political trainwreck of two sides hating each other and refusing to consider the middle ground. Academics should be able to profit from their work (or their sponsors should) for a limited period of time, then it should enter the public domain.
FWIW, I think the same approach makes sense for all copyright -- a period to make a profit, an extension period where you can choose to pay to keep your monopoly, with the cost increasing over time. Seems to capture the best of copyright (giving the creative the opportunity to turn a profit) and also captures the increasing cost to society over time of monopoly.
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As an aside, that is why I think the life sciences area has been completely dried up due to this mentality and to the publish or perish syndrome. And yes, I happen to work in the field myself...
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I agree. Without copyright every OSS product with significant academic contributions would suddenly lose GPL protection. There would also be huge legal fights for faculty over whether work was done on your own time (and therefore copyrighted) or done at work (and therefore public domain). You will also have trouble finding people to write academic textbooks - why write something if a publisher can just rip it off and make a (relatively small!) profit from your work? In addition you may see a significant brain drain from the US as faculty who make money from copyrights (authors from all disciplines, artists etc.) move to countries where their work is protected.
Indeed it would likely curtail sharing of material since I am more than happy to share my reserach code and educational material to those who ask for it under the CC non-comercial, share-alike license but would be far less likely to share if I knew some publisher could get hold of the material and sell it for profit (assuming they thought it worthwhile which is doubtful!) without my say. As you suggest what we really need is sensible fair use rights defined and enforced. Just because the current copyright system is being abused does not mean that the solution is to abolish it!
Yes, they are at the mercy of these journals, at least until they start their own, and it gains recognition in the field as an acceptable outlet for peer reviewed scholarship. The problem is that many of these journals have a monopoly on peer recognition in specific fields. And when scholars do open up new journals they usually go with one of the major publishers who set the terms anyway. See, scholars don't see themselves as providing a product to a market -- they are interested in advancing knowledge through their research, or getting tenure, or whatever. They're not trying to make a profit, but their work has been coopted by people who are. That's not inherently a bad thing -- obviously it allows for these nice paper journals to be published in the first place -- but the publishers have taken advantage of the situation and turned academics into a captive labor force. I simply don't believe they should be allowed to set such terms in the first place -- they should make known their peer review criteria and process, and publish anything that survives that peer review. Authors should retain the copyrights to their work.
So what? Once something is presented at a conference, as far as any patent or "commercial" issues are concerned, it has been publicly disclosed. It's possible a conference that intends to publish abstracts might object to the prepublication but that's their problem - if they want to try and stop it, good luck to them.
Yes, if you decide to go to a conference and present your "secret" results, then you've potentially got a problem. You should have thought of that before submitting the abstract. No, you can't get precedence on the record by submitting to a conference AND keep your results secret. There's a tradeoff - respect in the scientific community versus potential profits. That's the way it's supposed to be.
Personally, I think it's great if someone wants to tape, photograph, blog, tweet, e-mail, whatever my poster/presentation/chat in the hallway. Provided they do so with proper attribution. If they don't then you point out that your results are on record in the conference's proceedings and nail them for scientific misconduct.
The Nature editorial doesn't "request" anything. It suggests that the only viable options are completely open or completely closed.
Academic information should be free. Scarcity is bad; we won't get to post-scarcity (which only the very mean, in the literal sense, shouldn't want) if we continue to allow for artificial, weapons-enforced, scarcity. Neither should the Academy become like the Market---societies work better when there are multiple power centres, multiple ways of gaining status.... One whose only allegiance is to what's so (as opposed to whatever the State or the Market would value) is a great reality-check for the others.
(inclduign grad school publication)
You get much more recognition and brownie points for tenure if you publish in certain journals in your field. Its a racket.
There's also the issue of doing it "right the first time", probably means that they *already* ran the experiment some reasonable number of times. If I've already reproduced the results an appropriate number of times for the experiment in question, then how is it scientific rigor to go to all the time and expense of having to do the whole series of tests again?
If the school is funded in any way by tax money, then its public domain. Take one dollar in tax breaks or tax money into the school and you're public domain for everything, period. No exceptions. No loop holes. Don't like it? Go to a completely privately funded school that gets nothing at all from the government. If you want to enjoy the benefits of using my tax money then I get to enjoy the benefits of you using my tax money. This bullshit of schools selling stuff I paid to research to companies which then charge me a fortune to buy it back from them needs to end.
I have no problem making our children and future generations more intelligent and throwing into the pot to better the future for all man kind. I have a distinct problem with throwing into the pot to make some asshole professor more money while he rides the coattails of the students that he cons into doing all of his research for him in exchange for little pay (in the case of a phd student) or the students actually helping to pay his salary as well!
If they take ANY money from the government then I'm paying for the research and I expect access to it. I don't give a damn if someone else donates money to the specific project, if the the school takes any money what so ever from the government then you can not disassociate that money from the project. So if they got government funding for something specific, such as paying for some other building on another campus, you still can not disassociate the funding from the entire school because money the school would have spent on its own for the now government funded building is used for these other projects.
The school IS NOT A PROFIT CENTER. Its an educational center.
A completely privately funded, doesn't get any tax breaks, doesn't get any government funding, doesn't get any of my money or benefits of the government which are sponsored by my money, can do whatever the hell they want to at their school. Anything that has ever seen a dime of my money however, should not be allowed to do research that I can not use for myself.
University research is public domain, sorry if that pisses some douche bag professor off because he can't use someone else's money to make a name for myself, he should have got a real job.
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"I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim."
This statement is incorrect. You may need permission to reproduce a figure from a journal even if the paper is yours, but you can sure replot the data and you can for sure cite the data or reprint the data itself.
This is insane. I don't go to Bioscience conferences, but the conferences I go to usually ask that as many people as possible in the audience videotape, tweet, and blog about their event. It's not competitive pre-publication. It's free advertising. And if you do it constantly enough, people start sending you free full passes for their conferences, and plenty of free books to review.
Having to redo an experiment or study because of copyright concerns means you have bad legal advice.
You can't copyright facts. Writing about the facts of a study or experiment is nothing more than restating facts.
Sure, you can't just cut and paste someone else's summary of those facts verbatim (well, actually, you can in cases where they only state facts), but this still leaves you with clear ability to write about the experiment or study.
If you are unable to reword a summary of an experiment, do you really deserve to be in academia? There are thousands of PhD holders who'd love to take your place . . .
Of course, maybe the Techdirt author is from one of those legal jurisdictions (like the UK) which does allow authors to capture facts from the public domain in a compilation and thus gain a copyright claim over them. Even so, those protections are further limited to the compilation.
The Harvard piece, however, doesn't focus on the naive idea that copyright prevents the creation of new academic work directly.
Rather, it focuses on the indirect effect on innovation copyright imposes through barriers for disseminating copyrighted works. In other words, people are less able to gain access to academic works when medical journals cost literally hundreds of dollars to subscribe to.
Open access to scholarship aids this, but it does not eliminate the problem. No matter how open the access, the license to access the academic work depends upon whether the open access organization continues to grant it. Further, it often leaves academic work in one location and limits its ability to be republished and spread around.
Removing copyright poses the potential of aiding dissemination of copyrighted work, but of course it comes with its own problems. U.S. copyright law does not afford moral rights for authors as to attribution and other considerations -- whereas European laws do. Lack of moral rights may give rise to plagiarism and passing off in the academic world.
Nevertheless, the melodramatic idea that copyright stifles innovation because it prevents experiments or studies occurring is nonsense. If you have legal counsel advising this, dig deeper and ask pointed questions about what exactly they mean by this. If they can't articulate why you can't do the work, I would recommend seeking new counsel.
Heck, even patent law allows other people to recreate a patented device for personal use and the purpose of study.
Why do you want to take away my right to sell my copyright?
It's not that as much as someone might want to take away the right of the academic publishing cartel to make it a boilerplate policy to require all authors to sell their copyrights.
Copyrights should only apply to what they were created for...literature and musical compositions. Patents are so easily and heavily abused and if managed correctly would eat up so much taxpayer dollars...patents should be abolished. do this and the world's economy will be back on track.
as far as mp3 and video goes, spare me the poor suffering artist and stealing from the record labels and studios routine argument. downloading music and video, is it stealing? yes. however, many opportunities exist for the labels and studios to make money from people downloading un-DRMed, free music and video. if i leave 100 dollar bills on my front lawn, it's a bit rediculous to have someone thrown in jail or fined a million dollars for taking 24. it's plain foolish. if i was smart, i'd put up a fence and charge a well calculated admission fee to my lawn of 100 bills. i'd even let other enterprises put billboard advertisements on my lawn for the right price.
Some sort of mandatory "go ahead and use this as long as you give full attribution" license ought to do the trick I think.
Would a well-known license like Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 work as is, or would it need significant adaptation to cover the scholarly use case?
new technologies change societies. the wheel, the sail, the arrow, the printing press, the gun, the locomotive, the radio, the a-bomb... each sets in motion dramatic changes in how societies are organized and the rules of that society, written and unwritten. basic human truths don't change, but how they are interpreted DO change. established orders are upset and are shuffled
and now the internet is dramatically changing how we view "intellectual property". the entire set of laws concerning intellectual property are completely defunct. the internet has made them defunct. publishers are not a gentleman's club of a few powerful industrialists anymore, but any teenager with a cable connection. there is no way the rules that bound the gentleman's club can bind a billion teenagers. enforcing existing intellectual property rules is a joke. its not some sort of amazing revolution to fight those archaic intellectual property rules, its more that it takes farcical effort to continue abiding by them
the notion that people deserve something for creating a work never changes. but what they actually deserve and how that recognition is attributed DOES change. those who cling to the past think the debate is about giving content creators nothing. those who understand the future know its just about changing how attribution and respect will come to content creators tomorrow. no one thinks it is about ripping off content creators, that's just an unbridled fear
distributors, of course, are completely doomed. the internet has simply replaced them as much more efficient and cheaper. distributors must evolve into glorified talent agents, shadows of their former selves, or succumb to inevitable extinction. no one weeps for the chimney sweep or the horseshoe blacksmith, and so no one should shed a tear for nature, bertelsmann, etc.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
just eliminate that "for academic materials" in your sentence. Why allow any transfer of rights from the creator. Set a specific limit on the rights that may be transferred from the creator to another entity - say exclusivity is banned, or is banned for any period exceeding (1,3,5) years. That, for one, would fix the death plus 90 years, since the rights wouldn't extend after the death of the creator (okay, that was just wishful thinking).
Would this mean that the content industries would no longer "discover" young talent and make them super-rich overnight? Yes, it probably would. Would this be a bad thing? I don't think so.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1200
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1201
These cartoons really help to know where the work and the money goes.
Make publicly funded research a work for hire, with the government getting the copyright (and then releasing it into the public domain), or at least demand Open Access publication.
Problem solved (but you might need some earplugs to shut out the screaming of the traditional publishers ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
I have never heard of a journal or publication what would not allow you to cite your own or others work. A journals impact factor, the main metric used to rank journals is based on the citations its articles garner, so to do so would be detrimental to the publisher as well as the author, so the whole premise here makes no sense to me. Sure open access is great, but with $2000 publishing fees in places like PLoS it places a heavy burden on many researchers in these times of scarce funding.
copyright was invented for academia.
if anything, we need a new system for commercial works.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Facts and figures are not copyrightable period. That is why there is no copyright on the phone book, anyone can use the data as they see fit. So any facts disclosed in a paper are not covered by copyright, just the text describing them is covered. Write your own text and off you go.
"As an aside, that is why I think the life sciences area has been completely dried up due to this mentality and to the publish or perish syndrome. And yes, I happen to work in the field myself.."
The life sciences are absolutely exploding right now. Either you're completely burned out and need to look for a new career, or you're utterly clueless and will soon be sacked.
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Granted it can slow the process down, but - one could say that in redoing the work, you are proving it before commencing your work for which the previous work is apparently a foundation. Kinda like checking your facts before writing an article. Everyone has to do it. CYA. Cover Your Ass.
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
"I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim."
Then either you're being lied to, or those anonymous academics are idiots. You'd think the educated, especially those involved in publication, would understand at least a little about fair use.
As well as patents.
The very idea of "intellectual property" is incoherent with the principles of private property itself.
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License to publish at Nature Publishing Group (publishing house of "Nature" series of journals, really big payer in the field of natural sciences) draws my favorable attention. The point is that the aurhor isn't required to give out the copyright of their published contributions, instead authors grant NPG a license to publish their paper. As it comes to reusing parts of published papers in future work, prior publishers' permission isn't mandatory. This doesn't work in case of review papers, which are commissioned by the publisher, where NPG is granted full copyright.
Does license to publish do any difference? Yes, because six months after publication the author has right to archive the manuscript in a free-access repository, even on NPG's server.
There's one more thing, which however applies only to biological sciences. Since 2008 those papers in Nature which publish organisms' genome for the first time are copyrighted under Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike unported licence.
To conclude, it's worth noting that the academic world is pushing publishers towards less strict publishing policies, thats a big example.
the fact that copyright allows labels to benefit from sales more than artists is THE FAULT OF THE ARTIST for signing away forever and ever rights in exchange for an advance from the label.
While it's always good to remind people that they're the ones who sign on problematic contracts, ignoring the power asymmetries between parties is a formula for misunderstanding a situation.
Especially since today a record label is largely obsolete.
A few months ago I heard the frontman of a platinum-selling 90s band who's turned independent said "In case you're wondering if it's possible to succeed without music industry and marketing people, the answer is no." This is a guy with a huge legacy fanbase who's been working hard regularly releasing stuff for the last decade, some free on the internet, allows live recording and tape trading, and yes, he blogs and uses myspace and twitter and what have you. And yes, the music is decent.
I recognize there's cases where people have been able to leverage the internet to achieve a certain popularity or even level of meme-hood, and that music blogs and review sites have created whole markets where they have as much control as labels in some genres, and we're certainly at a point where independent artists can do a lot more bootstrapping than they used to, but bootstrapping all the way to a career and sustaining it is still difficult on your own.
Maybe we'll get to the points where labels are irrelevant, but we're not there yet, and at least part of the job a label does will *never* be obsolete.
Tweet, tweet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an avid supporter of the current system. I frequently get annoyed by my inability to access recent articles because my University doesn't have access to the online content, and the journal only makes articles Open Access after 6, 12, and sometimes 18 months. It's counter productive and prevents me from reading and citing papers from certain journals until after they are old news.
However, the quote chosen for the summary strikes me as the Academic equivalent of an Urban Legend. Maybe it's because I'm still early in my career (less than 10 publications so far), but I've never seen a journal that requires you to pay them if you want to cite them. Access, and reprints are how journals make their money, and reprints are virtually dead now that you can usually download a PDF copy of the final article. Journals WANT you to cite their articles, because it increases the chances of someone who doesn't have access already paying for reprints, or better yet a subscription.
Feel free to correct me if any of you have 1st hand experience to the contrary, not the ephemeral "I heard it from a friend, who worked with a guy"
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
And I've seen bright people burnt out because they can't get papers out fast enough... which is frankly ridicolous.
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This is a familiar discussion, although the assertion about not being able to cite your own work is bogus. I suspect that everybody in academia expects a new online publication model to emerge, but this is certainly taking a long time to converge.
The issue of so-called "intellectual property" is another recurring discussion, even outside the rabid FOSS ranks. See, for example (to cite myself as well as others): http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/11/29/an-ethical-question-involving-ebooks.
The absolutists here may want to consider a couple of complications. First, what about the very frequent case of multiple authorship? Without a third party such as a journal to whom to reassign copyright, the authors would constantly have to squabble between themselves about who - jointly, severally or individually - would retain copyright and in what proportions. Second, most corporate or educational institutions require their staff to sign over ownership of intellectual work products as a basis for employment in the first place.
There is no simple Platonic ideal of "property", let alone something called "intellectual property". The laws that exist (at least in origin) were primarily intended to defend the rights of the body politic, not of the individual "creator". Further, the notion of a truly individual creator is a fantasy. Newton saw further because he stood upon the shoulders of giants. (Or should I have quoted that 382 years after his death?)
they should be abolished, but since mankind seems determined to reinvent the wheel at every opportunity it's a moot point
Don't sign a contract that requires you to hand over your intellectual property rights if retaining them is so important to you
I think the fundamental problem we have with copyright laws is not whether they exist, but whether or not the author/creative artist receives compensation for their work, no? That is to say, for example, a recording artist deserves reasonable pay for their effort, yet the RIAA will likely (and IMO reasonably) be vilified until the end of history as the 21st century incarnation of the devil himself.
How about this for a change: Amend the copyright laws (and perhaps patent as well) such that only the creator of the work can own the copyright/patent for the term of their own life. Not extendable, and not transferrable, ever.
This would remove the secondary industry in creative intellectual property (which I view as somewhat parasitic) and change the focus to the artists and their works again.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It seems to me the issue is how credible (and hierarchically prestigious) peer review can be organized,
and how papers well edited, without funding for journal publishers.
Can a new model replace this, assisted by new info-sharing technology?
Maybe a social web app specifically for coordinating peer review and managing reputation of peers and "journals"
can help.
Anyone think that is feasible?
(Also, in conjunction with that, I guess Scientists co-ops could hire editors and peer-process coordinators.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
That the purpose of copyrights in academic world is to promote the progress of science if a copyright is impeding the progress of science it should be within the realm of the court
to either limit or vacate that copyright. The author of the paper should have an exclusive right to their writing not be forced to cede to a public institution or corporation.
Under this reading, "work for hire" laws are an unconstitutional abrogation of the exclusive right of the author or inventor.
Back a lifetime ago when I was still a Biochemist, I worked for a Gene Therapy lab in Madison that was not part of the University system. There were two branches of the company which were almost completely separate entites, the "Commercial" side which sold closed proprietary products (Things like Restriction Enzymes, Gene Delivery Systems...) that were developed as part of our research and the "Academic" side which focused purely on research. While the "Commercial" side pulled in quite a bit of money over half of the cash that ran the place was in the form of government grants which needed to be reapplied for every three years.
It was well known that if either source of revenue was taken away the research would be forced to stop. Obviously most of the customers on the commercial side were other academic labs and thus it was pretty much a reprovisioning of taxpayer resources so at first glance it seems like a waste of taxpayer money to copyright these things.
However, the fear really was not that some other lab would figure out what the stuff was and create it on it's own instead of buying from us. After all, the manufacture of some of our products required special equipment that may not have been found elsewhere. The fear was that a corporation would step in and start creating and selling our product lines. Then the flow of money would be from Taxpayer, to Academic institution to megacorp. Keeping the stuff closed ensured that Taxpayer money stayed in the Academic system, at least.
Perhaps there is a better way to do this sort of thing, but I think it would be very complex to get off the ground.
When I was an academic political scientist, no serious article that I can think of appeared first in a journal. There were always earlier versions, "working papers," and the like, the predated the published version. Obviously all these versions are copyrighted by default (in the US at least), and those copyrights are independent of the copyright in the specific version of the paper published in the journal.
So why is it so hard to find any of these earlier versions online? Here's a good test. Take an article that interests you that's available on a journal publisher's website. Do a Google search for the authors and try and find the earlier versions of the article online. I've not been very successful in my attempts to do this; perhaps you'll have better luck.
If I were still in academia, I can't imagine not releasing all of my work on the Web before it ever reached a published journal. And with the delays involved in journal publishing, it can be months or years before the findings actually reach the stage of journal publication. Do journals require that you remove all earlier versions of an article from public access before they'll agree to publish it?
An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What you fail to realize is that most of the journals are owned by a giant Fortune 500 company - Reed-Elsevier. Lately Universities have taken to boycotting Elsevier for their prices or unethical practices. http://www.library.illinois.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.html
For instance, organizing the trade of armaments
Here's a very ironic journal article - Elsevier implicating itself in the trade of weapons http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJN-4NX8KRF-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=56eb902c4de87a193e5e591a64781d53
Since you don't have access to that http://editor-mom.blogspot.com/2007/03/another-medical-journal-calls-for.html
Reed-Elsevier's former CEO, Sir Crispin Davis, was also on the board of directors for GlaxoSmithKline. Even after all this time, we're still controlled by a bunch of blue bloods with money.
As someone who as published around 45 papers, the idea that you'd have to repeat an experiment rather than reference the original work is bollocks. This is a "I had a friend whose cousin heard that" type story. The point is that the journal may have copyright on the text of the article as it is published the journal, but that is about all. They do not own the results of the experiment, and they would not want to. For a journal today, the most important number is impact factor, the average number of times a journal is cited by other articles. They spend considerable amounts of their time working out how they improve impact factor. The last thing in the world they would do is introduce any mechanism that stop researchers citing their papers. While in some cases it would breach copyright to have the pdf of your article on your web site, there is no reason no to link to the pdf on the journal website. This might restrict access in that the person wishing to view the article may need to have a subscription (usually through their university library) to access the content. But many of the journals now are either open access, or just restrict access for 6 months then make it open. I personally believe that all articles should be open access and publishable without expensive page charges, particularly to allow access to researchers in less developed countries, but making wild claims about "someone" not being able to cite your own results is only going to damage the cause.
These numbers should be of course (+extra digits for those who care)
exp(1) = 2.7 (1828182845904523536)
exp(5) = 148.4 (1315910257660342111)
exp(10) = 22,026.4 (6579480671651695790)
exp(20) = 485,165,195.4 (0979027796910683054)
log(1) = 0
log(5) = 1.6 (0943791243410037460)
log(10) = 2.3 (0258509299404568401)
log(20) = 2.9 (9573227355399099343)
All in the name of financing the journal.
What I don't understand is what the journals need all that money for. Scientists write the articles, and do the peer-review for free. Distribution is electronic, and the marginal cost close to free. (If we can find server-space for a hundred linux distributions, we can find server-space for a bunch of pdfs.) All the journal gives is tradition and prestige.
And for that, they charge whatever they can get away with, and take our copyrights. Truly inefficient economics.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Taxpayers the world over get milked funding universities the world over in a bet to make the world a better place. Students education (mine too, I went 4 years and convocated with a BSc), costs the taxpayer about 10,000 per student per year. The big gain is to society, altthough one could argue the student gets the most benefit. The research was heavily funded (30000-40000 per year). Taxpayers already paid. I understand if universities want to make more by patenting stuff. The general taxpayer pays for use of the patented idea. I understand that. Its not unreasonable to cut the universities funding by the amount they have to pay for the patented idea. Its only reasonable. I'm also disgusted by pharmaceutical companies that take papers published by government scientists, patent the (published and open) idea, and then turn around having done 0 research, and overcharge taxpayers for the medicine. They did nothing. a generic knockoff should be cheap! The patent should not be allowed!
I'd say yes, copyright of academic works should be abolished.
I work at a University and would be happy for anybody to have any work I produce. The tax payers pay my wage so the tax payers should benefit. I see it pretty simply.
The groups I work with should share work also. We already have an edge over other research groups worldwide cause we did something first and are 'in the zone'. If another research group overtakes us, well, we dropped the ball.
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Univerities are not funded well enough in sciences and similar to undertake the work they do, so they go into "public/private partnerships".
So companies paid for it and you want their investment to be nullified by making it BSD'd.
Or you can pay more tax to go to university to cover the research and have the work sent to the public domain.
Yes the copyright on Academic works should be abolished, and so should patents so that we don't waste our valuable scientific minds on re-inventing the proverbial wheel. I know that patents also have led to ingenious alternative solutions, but we are wasting our finite resources on protecting and defending these preposterous human constructs.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
I'd argue that most academic work is performed by public institutions, paid for by tax payer money. Whatever I write, create, invent, etc at my employer in my job belongs to my employer. Why shouldn't academic work be the same? And I'm not talking about the institution owning the rights. The public is the employer and everything should be open to the public.
Now, the use of private, protected works. Academia needs to follow the rules here. Just like everyone else.
There is no stifling of creativity. Just way too many lawyers and companies trying to turn a buck. There's nothing wrong with extending existing ideas. Building products might be different. But academia doesn't belong in the business of building products.
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These generalizations are pointless. It depends on the research project. A given research project is supported by a particular grant. Sometimes that grant comes from a government agency like the NSF. Sometimes it comes from a private company, normally with more strings attached. In either case, the arrangement does not directly involve the university; rather it is in effect directly between the professor and the funding agency.
Finally, if one were to insist on making great big generalizations, it would be more accurate to say that the taxpayers do indeed pay for the work, because a large majority of research funding comes from government agencies. This does vary a bit by field, I'll admit; in the more applied areas like semiconductor manufacturing and VLSI, there's more corporate money. But I'd say that most academic work is still government-funded. Private corporations have incentive horizons that are usually too short to justify funding any but the most obviously-applied research.