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Publishers Win On Only Five Claims In Copyright Case Against Georgia State
McGruber writes with news of a ruling in a copyright case brought against Georgia State by several publishers over the university's electronic reserve system: "The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that a federal judge has ruled in favor of Georgia State University on 69 of 74 copyright claims filed by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications. In a 350-page ruling, Senior U.S. District Judge Orinda Evans found that 'fair use protected a Georgia State University professor's decision to allow students to access an excerpt online through the university's Electronic Reserves System.' While the 69 of the 74 claims were rejected, the judge also found that five violations did occur 'when the publisher lost money because a professor had provided free electronic access to selected chapters in textbooks.' SAGE Publications prevailed on four of these five claims, while Oxford University Press won the fifth claim. Cambridge University Press lost all its claims."
From Inside Higher Ed: "And the judge also rejected the publishers' ideas about how to regulate e-reserves — ideas that many academic librarians said would be unworkable. At the same time, however, the judge imposed a strict limit of 10 percent on the volume of a book that may be covered by fair use (a proportion that would cover much, but by no means all, of what was in e-reserves at Georgia State, and probably at many other colleges). And the judge ruled that publishers may have more claims against college and university e-reserves if the publishers offer convenient, reasonably priced systems for getting permission (at a price) to use book excerpts online. The lack of such systems today favored Georgia State, but librarians who were anxiously going through the decision were speculating that some publishers might be prompted now to create such systems, and to charge as much as the courts would permit."
How about science publishers stop making money off of scientists? Not only do they not pay the people that write articles for their publications, they even make them pay to get a copy.
Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?
Here is a pretty good analysis from one of Duke University's legal advisors (posting in his role as blogger rather than formal legal advice, of course). Generally a win for libraries, but there are some oddities. For example, the specific rules on proportionality that the judge set forth are a bit odd and potentially gameable: 10% by page count of a work fewer than 10 chapters, or up to one full chapter for a work with 10 or more chapters. Does this still hold if presses start deliberately putting out books with a ton of really short chapters? Are there cases where >10% by page count should still be fair use? Copyright law doesn't actually set a strict percentage limit, though there might be some advantages in clarity if it did.
Another interesting aspect, which I got from this also-interesting analysis of the decision, is that many of the claims never even got to a legal analysis stage, because the publishers couldn't produce sufficient evidence of having a registered copyright: either they couldn't find a signed copyright transfer from the author showing that the publisher actually had copyright properly assigned to them, or they couldn't produce evidence that they had registered the copyright (a prerequisite under U.S. law for suing).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How about scientists stop being stupid? The journal of topology was supposed to set an example....
Science publishers sticking it to Universities, the institutions most capable of creating global multi-lingual free open reports and text books, 'erm' yeah, that's going to work out well for the publishers, 'Douh'.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Scientists do all the work from writing the papers to peer-reviewing it, including copyediting and typesetting. Then the authors sign away their copyrights to a "prestigious journal" so they can add a line on their CV. Neither the authors, nor the editors nor the reviewers are paid. The publishers then put the (often taxpayer funded) paper behind a paywall and charge 25$ for access to a single paper.
What is a "reserve" in this context? It's clearly being used as a technical term, but I'm not a librarian and I can't find a library-specific definition in the OED, Merriam-Webster, or a couple of other dictionaries.
This is exactly what they should be doing. Fortunately, some are trying http://thecostofknowledge.com/ .
Why do we need academic publishing companies at all? Everything they do can be done by universities working together over the Internet, and the lower costs could help reduce tuition rates.
Assuming, of course, that the goal universities and the professors they employ is to educate people. There are a scary number of professors who write textbooks in order to make money, rather than to communicate their knowledge to students.
Palm trees and 8
Because they have to do science, not fight copyright problems. Also, they just want their articles to be peer reviewed, not to be put with all the internet crackpots.
Why can't a government protect its scientists? After all, scientists are often using subsidies/grants to do their research, so they're basically giving tax money to publishers.
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Note that the peer review process does not need to be facilitated by academic publishing companies. Universities could organize peer review, and universities could publish journals online at no cost. Universities are also in a position to give researchers incentives to participate -- tenure review, bonus pay, etc. The only reason publishing companies came about in the first place was to meet the needs of scientists to have their work distributed to other scientists; now that we have the Internet, we really do not need publishing companies at all.
This is an issue that scientists should care about. In theory, scientists do their work to advance the state of human knowledge; this necessarily means making that new knowledge available to others. Right now, most scientific papers are unavailable to anyone who is not a scientist, with publishers demanding absurd fees for access.
Palm trees and 8
Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?
Some do, especially in computer science; see, for example, the cryptology eprint archive. Consider, however, the guidelines for publishing a paper in the Journal of Algebra:
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.
In case you were wondering who the copyright holder is:
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions). If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions.
Basically, if you publish an article in this journal, you must give them the copyright, and your submission will be rejected if you published the article previously, including publishing in the public domain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; an unscrupulous scientist might try to publish the same paper in many journals, and make it appear that he has done more work than he actually has. However, in the current system of copyrights and academic publishers, this has the side effect of ensuring that a scientist cannot make his journal articles available to the public at no cost.
Palm trees and 8
Note that the peer review process does not need to be facilitated by academic publishing companies. Universities could organize peer review, and universities could publish journals online at no cost.
Exactly. And this is how research in Brazil is published. Universities mantain open access e-journals with peer reviews. I can't believe that more developed countries are still bullied by academic publishing companies.
Why do we need academic publishing companies at all? Everything they do can be done by universities working together over the Internet, and the lower costs could help reduce tuition rates.
Academic publishers do two things: for research journals they provide a peer-review system which, when it is working properly, ensures that only peer-reviewed content is published in the journal so that we do not waste our time reading papers with little to no scientific value. Second, for text books, they provide editing and publishing services which ensure that text books have quality content and are readable (to some extent - it would be worse without editors believe me!).
While I think it certainly could be possible for universities to take on this role it will require organization and leadership to set up the same infrastructure whcih will be a huge job. In addition this would incur extra costs - someone has to edit books, run the peer-review system etc. Since the costs of editing, royalties etc. for a textbook are paid for by students purchasing the book were a university to do this it would increase the cost of tuition which would hopefully be offset by cheaper books. For research journals the cost savings would be against libraries budgets for purchasing so this would lower research costs and make more grant overhead money available - but this has to go for research not teaching because it comes from granting agencies.
So overall you probably win - certainly the onerous copyright issues would go away - but it is not a magic pill which will suddenly make everything cost free.
There are a scary number of professors who write textbooks in order to make money, rather than to communicate their knowledge to students.
It is publishers, not authors, who make the money in the text book world. The few academic text book authors whom I have talked with all said the same - you do it because you want to have good teaching resources not to make money. Yes you make some but it is only a small supplement to your salary in most cases.
Because few, if any, journals will accept a submission if they do not also get exclusive access to the copyright (or outright transfer of the copyright to them). I had the most fun when I was a government employee that worked for a research laboratory because WE WERE BARRED BY FEDERAL LAW from copyrighting anything (technically anything we wrote could never be copyrighted)....journals just LOVED us (NOT!)
Because they have to do science, not fight copyright problems. Also, they just want their articles to be peer reviewed,
OK, so won't those peers be in the same situation? Where there's a will, there's a way. Perhaps something like arxiv+
In the particle physics community it is standard practice to upload preprints to arXiv. In the legalese section they state that most publishers are tolerant of preprints, but many do not want the final version of the paper to be uploaded to the arXiv. In any case, most people do upload the final version anyway. I have never heard of them loosing their copyright goons on anyone in the community for this; I guess they know that we are generally intolerant when it comes to such douchebaggery, so they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to come after us. Personally I fully support any initiative to break the hold that these outdated cartels have over the publishing of science.
And it would be ridiculously easy and cheap to set up and kept running considering all the resources already available to universities. If you start deducting costs for even a single journal package over a year, you might even start saving money. All it would take is one prestigious university to assign a few grad students and endorse it. You could even limit access only to those universities that would submit papers (well pdfs) themselves. Bonus points if you require all your staff to submit a copy of any paper to this repository no matter where else they want to publish it. Make it a requirement to receive funding.
Step 1: Print a book. Charge $N.
Step 2: Quietly print each chapter, section, or other reasonable section as a stand-alone work. Charge much more than 50% of $N for each.
Step 3: Wait for professors to grant access to 9% or less of the book you printed in step 1.
Step 4: See if, in doing so, they are allowing access to more than 10% of any work you published in step 2.
Step 5: If they did, sue for each violation separately.
Step 6: Profit.
Oh, I forgot steps 7-9:
Step 7: Annoy the academic community.
Step 8: Get boycotted.
Step 9: Go bankrupt.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's happening slowly, but on a per-field basis. JOT is a good example of this. It took over when JOOP was killed by the publisher, and began with largely the same editorial team and set of reviewers. The only difference in the transition was that all papers went online and there were no printed proceedings. I've just been working with another conference that is now going to be publishing its own proceedings rather than going through an existing publisher, using a print-on-demand service for the hard copies and just hosting the electronic versions on a university web server.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Scientific papers can be published online for next to no cost. With their business under such a direct threat, suing Universities is practically suicide. Publishers are cutting their own throats.
write their own textbooks. Several of my comp-sci profs, and some other profs that are colleagues of my husband, write their own textbooks. They are then allowed to give students free access to their own locally hosted version, or the students can pay the blood money to the publisher (a used copy of my database textbook went for $120) if they so desire - since they know the professor gets a chunk of change from that sale.
Not all professors have the time or the skills needed to write a book, although depending on their contract, writing a text certainly helps them with the "publish or perish" problem. And if they get lucky, the text is adopted at other schools and they make a little extra cash from it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Who do you suggest they should make money off of, leprechauns?
As long as scientists want someone else to do the hard work of publishing (and yes, there is quite a lot of actual work involved), they're going to have to pay for it. They don't like it? - then they can self-publish, and good luck to them.