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."

Comments

Why consider this for academics but not music?

[Colonel Korn]

The biggest arguments here seem to apply to academics no more than to any other field. Why allow stifling of creativity elsewhere?

Re:Why consider this for academics but not music?

[grahamsaa]

I don't think music copyrights are generally a good thing (that is, they tend to benefit recording companies far more than artists, and do stifle creativity) but academia is different. Academics should be even more deserving of the right to use / cite / republish papers or scientific studies.

The point of working in academia is to seek knowledge and share it with others. Copyright prevents or severely limits that. If knowledge isn't shared, we're all more ignorant because of it. Academic works should all be published under the creative commons attribution license, or something similar.

Re:Why consider this for academics but not music?

[ivan256]

Selling recordings is a recent innovation in business models for musicians. (And only a small percentage of musicians make any significant amount of money that way.)

Most musicians throughout history have made money by performing the work. (Musicians, not composers).

You don't need copyright protection at all in that case, since you're the only person who can possibly be you playing your music.

Our current copyright system retards that process. Copyright assignment to recording distributors means that many musicians have to pay somebody for the right to play their own songs.

Re:Why consider this for academics but not music?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Sorry, but if I or CannonbalHead composes a 5-piece brass ensemble, NO ONE should be allowed to duplicate it without my permission.

Why? What gives you the right to stop other people from playing that music? If you say someone is not allowed to play it unless they compensate you, why should they listen? They have the music, they have the band, and they're willing to play, and people are willing to listen. Why should you, a third party, have to give the go ahead every time? Just because you wrote the piece 5/10/20/50/100 years ago? Why should you get to sit on your ass forever collecting protection money from people who actually play music for a living?

I mean apply your logic to somthing like "Happy Birthday". What you're saying is that if the person who wrote happy birthday, or their estate, was still around, people shouldn't be allowed to sing happy birthday without paying that estate a fee. What lunacy! ....Oh wait.

By this you say my composition is only worth the paper it's printed on. I call BS.

No, it's worth less than that. The paper needed would probably come to something like, say, 10c. On the other hand the composition itself would probably take less than 1MB to store, costing fractions of a cent. It would cost a fraction of that to copy the file across the world. The composition is effectively worthless.

This isn't some abstract argument. The worth of data is going down and down. The forces of reality are slowly catching up with a concept that was always slightly artificial to begin with. You cannot reasonably expect people to treat data worth next to nothing as something worthy of sacrosanct protections. The modern surge in copyright infringement shows that people do not accept the status quo that abstract data has concrete worth and value. As our ability to store and copy ever larger data files increases, this attitude is going to become even more pronounced.

The only parallel I can think of in history for the current effect of technology on copyright is the effect of the printing press on translation of the bible. The church maintained for years that teh bible could not, even should not be translated into the vernacular, and that to do so was heresy. But as printing presses came of age, technology improved, and slowly more and more "heretics"/criminals began to translate the book and printed copies came into circulation.

Nowadays, we think nothing of a printed bible in the vernacular, or indeed someones right to make one. But back then it was a contentious issue. I think a similar fate awaits copyright. As technology improves, the status quo will slowly pass from unreasonable to nonsensical, and the whole concept of copyright will either have to go, or be amended so it can cope with the new reality of the digital age.

Re:Why consider this for academics but not music?

[yankpop]

In a way, the researcher is being paid to produce materials FOR someone, and then that someone (university, funding source, contract, etc) gets the rights to that research. This is the same for any type of 3rd party work.

You're missing a very important point here. For most university researchers, the 'someone' that paid for the research is the taxpayer. But more importantly, the number of university professors whose research has the potential to generate profits for the university is vanishingly small compared to those who are engaged in basic research.

The service most of us are providing to our university employers is measured in courses taught, graduate students mentored, papers published, grants secured, and various other tasks lumped together as 'service'. The professor as profit generator is recent, still rare, and not entirely welcome development.

In many ways, the idea that university researchers should be engaged in producing proprietary 'intellectual property' is counter to the academic tradition that such work depends on. Why should it be acceptable for someone to take generations of 'open access' research in physics, engineering, medicine, or whatever, add a little piece on top, and forbid anyone else from using it? I'm not saying it should never be done, but certainly not in a publicly funded university.

No

[commodoresloat]

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.

Re:No

[DdJ]

It shouldn't be abolished, but fair use should no longer be restricted.

I'll take this further: it cannot be abolished, because in this field in particular, tools to combat outright plagiarism are pretty important. But it should be dramatically altered in ways that promote the free flow of ideas. It should be converted almost entirely into an anti-plagiarism tool, within this domain. Some sort of mandatory "go ahead and use this as long as you give full attribution" license ought to do the trick I think.

I wonder how MIT's "Open Journal" handles this

[peter303]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[slimak]

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.

A bit of work to do first...

[Profmeister 3000]

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.

Moral but not necessarily practical problem

[MLCT]

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).

What we need is publicly funded journals

[Goalie_Ca]

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??

Re:Bullshit

[commodoresloat]

It's not just about tenure; it's about the very goal of academic research -- to help advance knowledge. You don't do this without publishing in recognized peer-reviewed journals. And those journals call the shots in terms of what you give up to publish with them -- there is no negotiating; in fact, authors don't get paid at all. If you refuse to sign the contract, your article doesn't get published, even though it survived peer review. And don't say "just publish it on the web" -- it's not going to be taken seriously in your peer community without publication in recognized journals in your field.

Academic authors are not in it trying to make a buck -- very few ever do, and certainly not through journal publications. I think that peer review should be the only filter on academic publishing; there is no reason that journals can't start publishing academic work without such contracts.

Shorter Copyright?

[Bob9113]

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.

Yes

[commodoresloat]

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.

Re:Cite?

[interkin3tic]

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.

A Look at Nature Publishing Group Strategy

[modrzej]

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.