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Copyright Law Is Killing Science
HansonMB writes "Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting artists' ability to make money from their work, scientists don't use similar incentives. And yet, her work is often kept within the gates of the ivory tower, reserved for those whose universities or institutions have purchased access, often at high costs. And for science in the age of the internet, which wants ideas to spread as widely as possible to encourage more creativity and development, this isn't just bad: it's immoral."
Look: copyright has nothing to do with it. If you don't want the publication locked up, don't publish in journals that make you give up all your rights or negotiate a different deal. The fact is, on this point, copyright isn't necessary because the terms of the contract would just take over. If the publisher didn't want you to publish outside its pay wall it could ask you via your contract regardless of the copyright in the work.
This reflects more on the economic and business incentives of scientific journals than on copyright. The journals don't care about the copyright so much as they value the exclusivity and the first publication rights. Copyright is just a placeholder for a very simple non-publication clause and associated penalties (or liquidated damages).
Here's an article he got published in Nature back in 2001
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/stallman.html
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Under natural law, you typically only own that which is limited, in such a way you can control its use exclusively. But what about ideas? They aren't limited resources, anyone can create their own instance of an idea, an invention, a writing... http://mises.org/daily/5108/Ideas-Free-and-Unfree-A-Book-Commentary
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I'm interested in this. Not interested enough to watch a 50 minute segment on it. Is there a transcript somewhere?
If this is about open vs closed access journals
1. The situation is rapidly improving. While it's not where it needs to be, in the last few years we've seen a lot more journals providing open access.
2. The practice has been going on quite a while and we have yet to see science die. I don't think it can possibly be "killing" science. Limiting its potential, sure, but there's no way pay-for-access is having nearly as much effect as cutting funding for basic research.
For better or for worse, the "public option" probably deserves most of the credit for developing nuclear energy, the Internet, and space travel. Radio broadcasting as we know it was also large developed by the "public option," specifically university radio stations in the 1920s, a fact that was forgotten when radio became commercializable and commercial radio pretty well eclipsed the pioneers.
I don't think anyone can say what would have happened if the government had not chosen to fund these developments. The fact is, in the particular parallel universe we live in, they were developed publicly.
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I know, I should avoid answering obvious trolls especially ones who see the world only in terms of a philosophy that, much like communism, doesn't ever work in practice.
(2) is worse than (1) because not all science can produce a profit. Even if it can, it might not be an immediate enough profit. For example, how long did it take for the photoelectric effect to have a profitable application? How about quantum mechanics? General relativity? Heliocentrism? Modeling of stellar interiors? Sequencing genomes of lichen?
If (2) worked the way you think it would, (1) never would have been developed because the rich wouldn't have allowed government to get in the way of their revenue generation.
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Businesses don't bother with anything that doesn't have big, short term profit. They let the Guv'mint (sic) pay for it :(. Right now there's work being done on a Leukemia vaccine... in Europe. No company in the states would pay a dime for the research, because it'd be a one time vaccine that only benefits a few million people (many too poor to pay $$$ for medicine).
Also, most of the major advances in basic science are done on the public dime, and then companies swoop in to monetize it. Look up the history of the Rail Roads in the US. Fact is, you can't build the giant cartel we know & love today w/o the Gov'mint (sic, again).
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Government work should be public domain and PHD thesis I think are required to be.
That's news to me. My PhD dissertation is copyright by me, although I granted my university and my country's national library the right to distribute it.
Some PhD dissertations can be classified Top Secret, if they involve state or military secrets. I know at least one person whose dissertation was such.
As much as I favor the broad distribution of knowledge, ultimately I think the distribution of the results will depend on what the researcher arranges or negotiates with the institution who is paying him/her. Generally I favor the individual creator having copyright control.
But the busness end of Academia is going whole hog into getting not only copyright but patents locked down.
Don't be too quick to dismiss academic involvement with patents. As long as the patents themselves aren't "evil" I think academic institutions can provide valuable support to researchers who want to file patents, as long as the terms are fair.
In my teaching they were trying to copyright all instructional material and video presentations with no benefit for the instructors. Certainly not only should schools add to the public domain but patents and copyrights should belong to the creators of that intellectual property.
I agree that the instructors should be allowed to benefit freely from their own work. I confess I'm uncertain whether allowing a benevolent institution to hold the copyright (instead of the creator) is necessarily a bad thing.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Something close to that used to be the case. Not copyright per se because there was no such thing as printing and every Bible was transcribed by hand, but for about the first millennium and a half of the Church's existence most Bibles were written in Latin, which only the clergy could read. So to most people possessing a copy of the Bible would have been pointless; it was locked down, in effect, by a primitive DRM. A major point of the Protestant Reformation was the demand for Bibles written in the local languages so that people could actually read what God (supposedly) had said himself, rather than just taking the local priest's word for it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Work at a different school or negotiate a better contract, if you can. At many universities, the inventors (typically the grad. student or principal investigator) are the owners of their own works, in the first instance, but they can always choose to let the invention be prosecuted and maintained by their TTO. The exception is for research done with Federal funds which is subject Bayh-Dole and, frankly, the terms of the sponsor agreement with the government.
Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university. Which fantasy university are talking about where graduate students can negotiate better contracts? Which alternate-dimension United States do you live in where students can actually just go from school to school as needed?
The company I work for had similar language in the contract I signed. However, before signing that contract, I negotiated slightly different terms with the HR person. Bottom line, I agreed that all software or inventions I created *on company time or with company resources* would belong to the company; however, any software or inventions I created *on my own time* were mine. I also agreed that I wouldn't use my "insider knowledge" of the company to create a tool that I knew the company needed on my own time so that I could license it back to the company, nor would I create products or services in my off time to compete with the company I work for.
So, yeah...the terms you mention are pretty much typical in the tech industry, but you can sometimes negotiate terms that will alleviate your employer's ethics or competition concerns while still allowing you to create and own things that are unrelated to the company's business interest.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
...To prevent the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for unlimited Times to the employers of Authors and Inventors and Trolls the exclusive Right to all Writings and Discoveries.
There; FTFY. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige."
Do I publish articles to stick on my CV? You bet your ass. Those articles are at-a-glance evidence that when I say I know how to do skill set X, I've really done it. It also says that I get stuff done rather than sitting on my ass all day long. Where do I publish? The best journal I can (fuck Elsevier though) since prestige matters. Everybody knows what Science and Nature are. Everyone in your field also knows what the solid 2nd tier journals are and if you've published just there, that's ok. If you publish only in "The Whoosit Journal of Whatsit," then you've got a problem.
Journal prestige aside, do I want people to read my papers? HELL YES! Does it matter if people read my papers? HELL YES! Why does it matter? If people read my papers it's because they're either interesting or relevant to their own work, or both. If they read my paper, they may cite it when they write up their own results or review article. Citation indexes exist, the most well known is probably google scholar. What the hell do you think journal prestige comes from if not from the citations the average paper published therein gets? The higher the rank of the journal, the pickier they are about what they let in, and the higher the expectations that it will get read, get cited, and influence people! Journal aside, if your paper has been out more than a year or two and nobody's cited it, your stuff doesn't fucking matter--expletive required. If your paper has been out five years and is still getting a half-dozen citations a year, you got a middling paper that fills in some important details in your field--good for you your research matters! If your paper has been out for five years and gets two dozen citations a year and you've got another half dozen just like it, then in your field you're a force to be reckoned with and everybody and their dog knows who you are. Even stepping out to related fields your name is familiar, and if you're out job hunting it's easy to check and see how influential you are by asking around your peers or checking citation indexes (google scholar again). If nobody cites your stuff, then nobody reads your stuff, and then your stuff might as well be published in "The Journal of Shit Nobody Cares About." Who wants to spend years doing shit nobody cares about? God damn right I want people to read my fucking work--expletives absolutely required.
Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university.
At the University of California researchers, both faculty and students, are required to inform a technology transfer office of any discovery that is potentially patentable. This agency handles all the paperwork and other legal issues, and it also handles licensing the patent to interested commercial organizations. The fees collected for the licensing gets split:
*** 25% for the researcher ***
25% for the researcher's department
50% for the UC system
Also the fees take into account the nature of the licensing organization. Small local startups are changed less than large out-of-state conglomerates.
At least that's what I recall from the presentation I attended in 2007.