[TOS] Copyright assignment considered harmful?

Sebastian Benthall sbenthall at gmail.com
Tue Aug 23 23:54:59 UTC 2011


Luis,

Could you explain more about how your open-access journal is reproducible,
or point me to something describing how?

Thanks,
Sebastian


On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com>wrote:

> Mel,
>
> Academic publishing is split today into
> two parallel universes:
>
> A) The Open Access community
>
>                   and
>
> B) The Traditional Publishers using business models
>     that pre-date the industrial revolution.
>
>
> Some publishers are slowly moving from (B) to (A).
>
> Some others still doing (B) are hoping that (A)
> will go away and that they will survive with their
> traditional business models.
>
> Sadly enough, most of the scientific and technical
> societies do (B).  For example IEEE, ACM  and ACS.
>
> IEEE went even to the extreme of lobbying *against*
> the NIH Public Access policy.
>
>             http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
>
> (That requires all NIH publicly funded research
> to be published in Open Access so it is available
> to the taxpayers who... paid for it).
>
>
> IEEE want's to protect its stream of +$50M/y revenue
> that results from Journal subscriptions and conferences.
>
> As Clay Shirky said: Institutions lose track of their mission
> and quickly turn to focus on self-preservation...
>
>
> Fresh minded publishers, such as PLoS and
> BiomedCentral have embraced the Open Access
> model, and have promoted policies in support of
> Open Access publishing for Federally Funded
> research (there is an ongoing bill that will extend
> the NIH public access policy to other 11 Federal
> agencies).
>
>
> Your options today,
> then come down to:
>
> 1) Find an Open Access Journal in the
>     area of your interest, and publish with them.
>
> or
>
> 2) Attempt to not transfer your copyright when
>    publishing with a traditional Journal that
>    does (B), and instead just give them the
>    license that they need to publish your work.
>    Typically a Creative Commons by Attribution
>    License should do the trick. In this option,
>    be ready for a fight...
>
> or
>
> 3) Start your own Open Access Journal.
>
>
> In the domain of Medical Image Analysis,
> we took option (3), about six years ago:
>
>      http://www.insight-journal.org/
>
> We made it open, we made it free,
> we made it reproducible.
>
> ---
>
> The typical argument that you will hear is
> that Traditional Journal in (B) have the "best
> reputation", and highest "impact factors",
> and that therefore you should bend to their
> primitive intellectual property practices.
>
> The reality in the ground is that "impact
> factor" is a bogus measure, computed by
> a company using a "proprietary method",
> that nobody have ever managed to reproduce;
> and that "Reputation" is something that we
> (as a community) do for the Journals, when
> we send our best papers to them, review
> (for free) for them, serve as associate
> editors (for free) for them, serve as editors
> (for free) for them.   It is quite a nice business
> model, when you think about it. They get their
> content for free, the quality verification for free,
> and sell content at high prices.
>
> For example,
> some Elsevier Journals has higher profit margins
> than Microsoft and Google:
>
> http://www.righttoresearch.org/blog/6-reasons-open-access-matters-to-the-medical-commu.shtml
>
>
> --
>
>
> PLoS gained a reputation of excellence
> in just about six years, beating Science
> and Nature, that have been around for
> more than a century.
>
> So, reputation can be build,  as long as
> a community commits to its principles.
> (...you know that better than most of us..)
>
>
> You probably will also be exposed to the
> fallacy of "Publish or Perish", which sadly
> is the mother of all the current mediocrity
> in the larger field of scientific research.
>
> It doesn't take too long to figure out that
> if academics are rewarded for the number
> of published papers, then they will publish
> as many paper as they can, with as little
> content as they can. Helas, that's what
> we get today.
>
> ---
>
> Stick to your guns and your Open Source
> instincts. Academic publishing is broken,
> and Open Access is part of the remedy.
>
>
>      Luis
>
>
> ------------------------
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 2:12 AM, Mel Chua <mel at redhat.com> wrote:
> > (The subject line is an allusion to
> >
> http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html
> .)
> >
> > As some of you know, I started grad school this week. And... culture
> shock.
> > Ohhhh boy, culture shock. (Yes, I know every professor who's had me for
> > POSSE is now chortling with we-told-you-so glee.) One incident came
> today,
> > when at the urging of Karl Fogel, who runs http://questioncopyright.org,
> I
> > looked into academic copyright -- specifically, what's the deal for the
> > places TOS typically submits to (FIE and SIGCSE)?
> >
> > A few hours and a quietly dawning horror later, I... think I've screwed
> up.
> > My first couple co-submissions of work on teaching open source are,
> > ironically, *unable* to be open-licensed. I've documented my naive
> findings
> > here:
> >
> http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/20/in-which-mel-is-saddened-and-bewildered-by-academic-copyright-assignments/
> >
> > Please tell me that I'm missing something. How can we get
> > academically-published TOS output released under open licenses? Why do we
> > put up with this? Yes, I understand the publishing industry needs to make
> > money and this "way of doing things" was well-intentioned at the time
> they
> > were designed, but... but... why?
> >
> > --Mel
> >
> > PS: This isn't the only thing I've written about academic culture shock,
> btw
> > -- for instance,
> >
> http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/17/academic-culture-shock-grad-student-ta-training/
> .
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> >
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