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

[Don Davis]

Having to assign copyright to someone else recently felt like a sort
awkward uncomfortable rite of passage in the academic world.

What's a list of the better 'open' journals?

Yeah...
It's part of the larger society we live in that basically lives
unquestioningly with these expectations.

The copyright agreements often seem very overwhelming. (I'm thinking of
ACM.) It seems as if everything associated with the data you use belongs
to them. This is not necessarily so. For example, first level
descriptive data - you described that __% ___ and ___ % ____.  That
stuff gets used again and again from multiple data sets.

To quote someone more knowledgeable than I:

"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."

So, don't go spreading your hypotheses and keen insight to very specific
elements around and you should be fine.

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.
There may be some contexts where this is impractical / inadmissible.
However, this is certainly not new. -- I've heard of professors with
boxes of 'data' -offering "want to write a paper? here's some data." The
first order stuff is all the same, but the second order findings would
all be different (or found independently at least).


On 09/30/2011 09:55 AM, Mel Chua wrote:
> Just wanted to give y'all a heads-up on two things I'm working on that
> might be TOS-useful. A related (and overlapping, but not quite the same)
> blog post is up on Planet TOS at
> http://blog.melchua.com/2011/09/30/hacking-on-copyright-addendums/.
> 
> Many of you will recall my outburst re: academic copyright assignment a
> few weeks back.
> (http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/20/in-which-mel-is-saddened-and-bewildered-by-academic-copyright-assignments/
> and emails to this list around that time.)
> 
> Well, I started hacking on that with the help of our (awesome)
> department librarian, Amy Van Epps. Specifically, we're looking at
> copyright *addendums* that you can staple to the back of your mandatory
> "yes, <publisher>, I will sign my soul and all my rights away" agreement
> document -- think of the addendum as a vaccine against the copyright
> assignment document, because it negates a bunch of the clauses in it and
> lets you retain important controls over your work (for instance, you may
> say that after $timeperiod you'll be able to distribute your work under
> an open license).
> 
> There's some existing on about this which is totally solid on the legal
> side, but it's largely (1) geared to academics and (2) nobody knows
> about it, not even the academics it's geared towards.
> 
> For instance: http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/
> 
> There are also institution-specific ones that have adapted from this
> upstream, and I'm trying to find and look at a collection of them too
> (yay, legal text).
> 
> What we're working on right now is a copyright addendum that is friendly
> to folks from the FOSS world -- doesn't assume an academic background or
> a ton of copyright fluency -- and then once we find/make that, spreading
> it as wide as humanly possible so that it actually gets used. (First
> step: does Science Commons fill that need already?)
> 
> For those looking for more information on the topic of copyright (geared
> towards authors who don't want their rights taken away),
> http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/ is pretty awesome.
> 
> Summary: If you're submitting something to a conference/journal/etc and
> get a copyright assignment form to sign, please consider looking at that
> copyright addendum and seeing if it'll be useful to you to include that
> stapled to the back -- it takes 5 extra minutes to keep your rights to
> making your own work open and free and accessible to others.
> 
> And if you're interested in working on this sort of thing, or already
> working on this sort of thing, please holler.
> 
> --Mel
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