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."

Comments

Creative commons!

[NalosLayor]

Creative commons has a tool to help, and human readable licenses. I'd guess you can find what you need there. http://creativecommons.org/

Re:Creative commons!

[NeutronCowboy]

And what he's probably looking for is CC BY-ND. "This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you."

Re:Creative commons!

[melikamp]

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.

You did check with your department first, right?

[damn_registrars]

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.

put not for use on turnitin on the copyright

[Joe_Dragon]

put not for use on turnitin on the copyright

Re:You don't own it

[PopeRatzo]

It doesn't matter what you want to put on your thesis, you university owns the copyrights to it.

I don't think that's even true for half the universities. I'd be surprised if it was true for 1/3 or 1/4.

I've seen thesis manuscripts with and without copyright language and none of them has ever been held up or given any trouble from the institution. And I've been on PhD panels for several universities, public and private. Had scores of grad students get their degree without this ever becoming an issue.

I remember a university head librarian who wanted to make an issue out of this and he was practically laughed out of the meeting. And this at a top-five US school.

All of this changes with faculty research and other publications, of course. Then it matters, big time.

Science is based on open information sharing

[presidenteloco]

(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.

Re:Science is based on open information sharing

[pz]

This is a remarkably naive viewpoint. I am responding only because it has been modded (at this point) to +3.

Journals who require payment for full text or PDF download do not "ensure that only academia and the richest institutions have full access ..." I work at one of the oldest and most famous institutions in the world. Many of the journals where my peers publish are not on the subscription list, and thus I must pay for each access. So, that assertion is not true.

Each paper costs perhaps $10 to $20. Please show me someone who is smart and motivated enough to be able to contribute to scientific thought and advancement who cannot afford that on occasion. And yes, I pay for those articles out of my own pocket.

Before the Internet, we had manuscript request cards where, if you saw a paper referenced, you could send a card to the author, and they would mail you back a hardcopy of the manuscript. Up until a few years ago, I would still get one every now and then from somewhere in the far east or Africa. The cost for those is a stamp and a postcard. Please show me someone -- anyone, even one person -- who is sane enough to be able to contribute to science and cannot afford that.

Even now, most publishers allow authors to post PDFs of their work on the author's private web site. If you can afford internet access, you can get nearly every paper. If you can't get one immediately, you can still send email to the author and request a copy in the email equivalent of the post cards from yesteryear. Please show me anyone -- even one person -- who can afford internet access who cannot get email access and request PDFs, or printed manuscripts, that way.

Yes, it is not quite as convenient as being able to immediately download manuscripts from the publisher's web sites as soon as they are published. Boo-hoo. I can't afford to live in the best neighborhood, and that impedes my ability to be a professional scientist because I have a longer commute. Is that also despicable? Should I be allowed to live in the best areas for no cost just because I *want* to?

Modern science, in most but not all fields, is an expensive proposition. The days of amateur scientists making serious contributions in all but a small number of areas are long gone. Saying that we must make all access free (and thus eliminating the valuable filtering service that the journals provide) is a nice pipe-dream but is not rooted in reality. Furthermore, a smart and sufficiently motivated person can make contributions to science -- I had an intern two summers ago who overcame some serious hurdles, including coming from a third-world country, stayed 1-1/2 months in my lab and did enough work to have two publications come out of it -- and not having immediate and free access to all articles is not a limiting factor.

Re:Science is based on open information sharing

[Anonymous Coward]

(posting from my phone)

In my field I have published over 2,000 articles over the years - over 100 in peer reviewed journals.

The model needs to change.

Most of these research papers are funded by public research dollars.

Those research dollars paid by publication fees to the publishers (yes, we have to PAY THEM to publish our papers).

Others do the peer review for FREE (I know I have never been paid to do a peer review - and I have done many)

The publishing houses get the publication fee (which can be substantial), charge for the journal (again, not the cost of popular science), charge for database access (again, fairly good $$ in this alone), and charge more for individual papers (The best part is that they all claim they are poor doing so!)

For what, exactly?

The NIH got it right requiring all NIH funded research to be published in pubmed.

The public should have access to them.

It's no longer the 1800's or even the 1900's. Its 2011, and its time to open the flood gates of information.

Re:Science is based on open information sharing

[smallfries]

Not every field operates the same way. Perhaps you only need to access other papers "on occasion". In my field I need to check 50-100 papers during the research that goes into every one that I write. Why is it reasonable for me to be charged $500-2000 by publishers to access research that they did not create? Not all publishers allow private copies of papers to be hosted on a researcher's website. I trust that your field is not dominated by the IEEE and ACM?

Free access does not imply lack of review. Your point about journals providing filtering is flawed - just look at any of the newer open access journals in CS that do provide filtering by reviewing.

post it online; problem solved

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:You did check with your department first, right

[Dyinobal]

So basically your shit got stolen by corporate thugs who held your education for ransom?

Best copyright notice

[phantomfive]

Best copyright notice I know of came from Woody Guthrie:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Really? This is your best effort?

[RedLeg]

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

Re:Say WHAT?

[kylemonger]

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.