[TOS] Quick update on "make scholarly copyright suck less" project

[Don Davis]

This is very in keeping with the 9-29 Princeton Open Access Publishing
article: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/09/29/28869/


On 09/30/2011 10:36 AM, Mel Chua wrote:
> On 09/30/2011 11:21 AM, Don Davis wrote:
>> Having to assign copyright to someone else recently felt like a sort
>> awkward uncomfortable rite of passage in the academic world.
> 
> But it *doesn't* have to be a rite of passage. I mean, yeah, the
> situation sucks and we *do* have to deal with it now, but just "putting
> up with it" or quietly avoiding the medium of peer-reviewed journals
> entirely won't make it change. I'd like to make things so that someday
> my own PhD students won't have to go through that at all. (It may be a
> very far-off someday. That's okay. We have time.)
> 
>> What's a list of the better 'open' journals?
> 
> So I've looked at this some, and sadly in our field the "good" journals
> and the OA journals overlap in... zero places, as best as I can tell.
> (Actually, I couldn't find any OA journals I would want to submit my
> scholarly work to, but my subfield is engineering education so others
> may have more pointers.)
> 
>> The copyright agreements often seem very overwhelming. (I'm thinking of
>> ACM.)
> 
> ACM is actually pretty standard. IEEE is worse, they'll ask for
> copyright assignment upon *submission* -- not even acceptance! One of
> the other major publishers in my field, ASEE, has even weirder and
> loopier and fuzzier copyright stuff... it *is* overwhelming. It also
> seems like we tend to deal with the overwhelmingness by signing the
> papers so we can move on with our lives/research instead of getting
> mired in legal stuff which isn't interesting to us. So major props for
> taking the time to look at this, Don -- and thank you.
> 
>> "You're not giving ACM the copyright to the dataset -- just the paper
>> itself. Research hypotheses are, in general, second order – that is,
>> they're not simple descriptions of the data (i.e., sample size, gender
>> distribution). On a public dataset, descriptions (first-order analyses)
>> are assumed to be public, as well."
> 
>> It seems to me then (with my limited knowledge and limited copyright
>> finesse), that making the dataset public before submission may be a way
>> to guarantee(?) that you and others may continue to evaluate the data.
> 
> I think so! Seb Benthall sent me a link to a blogpost from one of his
> colleagues from Berkeley on exactly this strategy, and then I think I
> lost the link (or at least can't find it now). Seb, do you remember what
> I'm talking about?
> 
> --Mel