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."

Comments

Then don't publish there

[reebmmm]

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).

Re:Then don't publish there

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Nice advice, but that doesn't help me as a researcher right now.

Every day, as I search for papers to research, I encounter pay-walls asking for $30, $40, $50 for a single paper. If I had paid for every paper I wanted to read of the course of my academic career, I the bill would have run into the tens of thousands.

Multiply that by the number of researcher in the world and you begin to grasp the scale of the legacy problem that the world research community is facing. The last 75+ years of published papers are locked up forever in what is essentially an extortion racket.

Bottom line, following market philosophies and greed, the academic publishing industry has hiked prices to unbelievable levels. $40 for a 200KB pdf is by now, the industry standard price. True, researchers need not pay such costs up front if their library has paid for a subscription to the required journal, but this merely passes the cost to the library and the institution to which it is attached. (I suspect researchers at wealthier institutions are utterly oblivious to the problem of academic pay-walls as their libraries have subscriptions to everything.)

My position is simple. We don't need the academic publishing industry(Except for their illgotten trove of past papers). Papers are written, reviewed, and edited by academic volunteers for free. What should simply happen is that universities should publish their own journals, online, using the simple, cheap web distribution methods.

The academic publishers would kick and scream about government monopolies and such rot, but they are nothing more than parasites who are stifling legitimate academic research and progress and should be ignored. Their "services" cost no more than pennies for each journal annually, yet we are expected to pay a significant percentage of our national GDPs to access research which was originally funding by the public purse anyway. Scams like this make me wonder if something is pathologically wrong with western society.

Stallman's been saying it since 2001

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Here's an article he got published in Nature back in 2001

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/stallman.html

Re:Stallman's been saying it since 2001

[SETIGuy]

The GPL license doesn't make it illegal to distribute software unless you comply with the demand you also distribute the source. It's already illegal to distribute software that you don't own the copyright to. The GPL makes it legal to distribute the software iff you also distribute the source. The distinction is important, and you have failed to notice it.

Copyright law has killed written articles?

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:Words by themselves are nothing

[dpbsmith]

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.

You can pretty much forget #2

[rsilvergun]

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).

Re:Patents as well

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Not the point

[Bowling Moses]

"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.