Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Copyright Terms For a Thesis?
plopez gets in his first Slashdot submission with this question, writing: "I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me. I know the joke is 'No one will ever read your thesis,' but in the slim chance it is useful to others I don't want them to be required to hunt me down for a release. Basically I want to say: 'Copyright is released as long as this work or excerpts is properly attributed. Also, any published excerpts cannot be copyrighted by other parties, nor can the original work in its entirety.' Is this good enough? I don't want to encumber legitimate uses of the work but I also don't want some pirate coming along and stealing it out of public domain. Is public domain good enough? Or does it allow the work to be restricted by commercial interests? I know of copyleft, but copyleft is a family of copyright notices and I am unsure which one is right for my intent. Please help."
Because no matter what your intentions are, I would highly advise against jeopardizing the progress of your MS just because you want to use copyright terms that your department doesn't agree with. If you haven't already, I would very highly recommend you check with them first to see how they manage the copyright of theses that are written there. Depending on the institution you may even need to go higher than that to find the official policy and find out if it has any flexibility.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
...by you and state the year you wrote it. Also, use the copyright sign and the phrase all rights reserved. Then this, "Copyright is released as long as this work or excerpts is properly attributed. Also, any published excerpts cannot be copyrighted by other parties, nor can the original work in its entirety," is assumed.
(with proper attribution)
Any restriction on this is a despicable attack on the advancement of science.
Current journal paywalls ought to be against the law. They ensure that only academia
at the richest institutions have full access to other scientists' work.
Academics at poorer institutions, here and around the world, and amateur researchers
who may be just as intelligent as the established, are shut out. It is an outrageous
and unjustifiable situation.
We need a different economic model to pay for the service of editing and coordinating
peer review. Maybe that cost ought to be covered by a journal submission fee.
Hardcopy publication is now officially not needed, nor should we be paying hardcopy publishing
companies just for the right to view the online published information. That's rubbish, and
it's harmful to the progress of knowledge.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Darn, my mod points just expired :) This is pretty much exactly what the OP asked for. Although, OP said "I also don't want some pirate coming along and stealing it out of public domain", so may be CC BY-SA is more up to the task. It all depends on whether derivative works that go beyond verbatim quotation are desirable.
I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me.
Post a digital copy online. Problem solved. As long as a digital copy is available for free online, others will have access to it, regardless of its copyright status. If you're in a field like physics, you could post it on arxiv.org. If you're in a field that doesn't have anything like arxiv, just post it on your own site, or on a site such as scribd.
Find free books.
Warning: --Flammable Objects ahead!--
You're polishing your thesis, the crown jewel of a Masters of Science degree, and you can't figure this one out on your own?
Worse, you ask HERE!?!
Hint: Perhaps you should harness some of the experience in researching that you've piled into the past 5-7 years of academia, along with INSIDER ACCESS to academia to get an answer and recommendation worthy of consideration. Does your university have a law school? Go find a member of the legal faculty with some modern clue in the field of intellectual property.
On the other hand, you could rely on the 2^n monkeys on the Internet banging random crapola into keyboards to eventually come up with the "right answer".
Oh, wait......
( Sheesh.... )
Red
With Google around, plagiarists would have to be idiots to try it at this point.
What I want to do when I read a paper is learn something I can use to make my code better, or to learn that the problem is way harder than I thought and I need to find a workaround. The problem these days is actually being able to read papers without being affiliated with a university, because so many papers are behind publisher paywalls or trapped on internal-only university servers. Someone having to pay what a textbook costs to read a ten year old paper is probably not what the author had in mind when they wrote it.
Please whatever copyright you use, post the paper online so bright but indigent students can read it.
Please do not *ever* recommend ND for anything of this nature again.
Think about it -- research builds upon other research. That's the whole point of publishing research.
We *want* people to build on the work. ND *specifically* tells people 'you're not allowed to do *anything* with my research'. SA's another messy one, as it sets a restriction on derivatives.
The best thing authors should do is to make sure that they don't lose their rights to the document, so that they can re-distribute the paper, no matter what stupidity the journal publishers do. And for that, see Creative Common's Scholar's Copyright Project:
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.