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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."
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.
Most scientific journals that I have experience with to not pay authors in any way. This is certainly the case with all IEEE journals and several other scientific journals. Signing over the copyright is the cost of entry if you want your work published. There are probably exceptions to this, possibly for work that is easily identified as ground breaking. But my experience has always been that there is nothing paid when the copyright is transfered. In fact, most journals still ask for printing charges. This are usually optional (and I opt out) except when color figures are included in the manuscript. If there are journals paying authors I would like to know.
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).
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.
It's odd that the summary and article claim that without actually citing any examples. The article just says "I've heard of..." Makes me wonder if it's not an overstatement, a misstatement, a severe miscommunication, or an absurdly bad publication that told a researcher an outright lie which he believed. Citing your own work, saying "I found this and published it here" can't possibly be barred by any publication. For one thing, citing an article increases the impact factor of the article, it's worth. A journal that is trying to decrease it's impact factor by saying you can't cite your own work is a journal that is shooting itself in the foot about three different ways.
I think what might be more likely is that the author of the article heard about a researcher who wanted to republish a figure he had published in another journal, and that journal wouldn't let him. And that's something that SHOULD be barred, you can't republish the same data twice, nor do you need to. BOTH journals would have problems with that, as would other researchers in the field. It's basically getting credit twice.
One exception to that would be if a researcher was publishing a review type article and wanted to include a figure or diagram from the original paper, making it clear though that it was not a new result but was old data included in a summary of the literature on a subject. That again is a journal shooting itself in the foot and would be ridiculous if it happened. I've often seen figures from other publications in review articles, journals that published the original data seem willing to work out an agreement with whoever is publishing the review. I've never published one, so I'm guessing, it again goes back to the impact factor. If you run a journal and an important result was published in it, you want people to know it was both an important result and was published in your journal.
This really seems like something that can't occour often to me. I could easily be wrong for other non-biological fields that I have no experience in though.
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.
It might be interesting to know whether this constitutes a valid contract. In English law, at least, you need "consideration" (both parties benefit), and you have situations whereby someone with a property which is effectively worth negative amounts (e.g. a house which would cost more to repair that it could be sold for once repaired) has to sell for a token amount (usually one pound) because giving it away wouldn't actually transfer ownership. Does having your paper published qualify as consideration?