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

[Mel Chua]

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