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?

[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.

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.

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.