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Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Mar 14, 2008 10:05 AM
from the mine-mine-mine dept.
from the mine-mine-mine dept.
I don't believe in imaginary property writes "The flagship physics journal Physical Review Letters doesn't allow authors to submit material to Wikipedia, or blogs, that is derived from their published work. Recently, the journal withdrew their acceptance of two articles by Jonathan Oppenheim and co-authors because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia and the Quantum Wikipedia. Currently, many scientists 'routinely do things which violate the transfer of copyright agreement of the journal.' Thirty-eight physicists have written to the journal requesting changes in their copyright policies, saying 'It is unreasonable and completely at odds with the practice in the field. Scientists want as broad an audience for their papers as possible.' The protest may be having an effect. The editor-in-chief of the APS journals says the society plans to review its copyright policy at a meeting in May. 'A group of excellent scientists has asked us to consider revising our copyright, and we take them seriously,' he says."
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Rather obvious solution (Score:5, Funny)
Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that, as an author, I particularly liked the charges for submitting (or the insane charges for subscription), but there is reasonable motivation behind it.
Parent
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:5, Interesting)
What about a fairly high cost for submission (no, not that kind of submission) that you would be refunded if the article is accepted and published?
Parent
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Although, with financial incentive to get a paper accepted on top of the academic incentive, I fear for the grad students.
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
You don't need to pay to publish! (Score:4, Informative)
The idea of refunds, or charging for publication as a way to select publication is just non-sense. You don't need to refund something you don't pay in first place. Selection of papers is done through peer-review, a hard enough process the get through, that money isn't really the issue.
Parent
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How much do the authors pay?
How much do the magazine need to maintain quality work so they are taken seriously by the community?
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Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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claiming? (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. The journal is not "claiming" any "intellectual property". The journal is saying that, if you want them to publish your work (which no-one is forcing you to do) then you must assign them the copyright. If you don't like it, publish in a different journal. Since the journal makes money from subscription, they don't want you to benefit from their prestige by getting the pa
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Rewriting (Score:4, Insightful)
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But at least it creates a secondary market for linguisticians to study the various versions and write papers that provide insight into the rewriting process...
Maybe I'm in the wrong field (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field (Score:5, Informative)
For chemistry:
From http://pubs.acs.org/copyright/forms/copyright.pdf [acs.org]
For physics:
From http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.pdf [aps.org], which interestingly enough wouldn't let me cut-and-paste without using a hacked version of xpdf. :P
Parent
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That'll show 'em.
Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field (Score:4, Funny)
No, that is only funny if you do it to the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Parent
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Copyright to the above work (including without limitation, the right to publish the work in whole or in part in any and all forms of media, now or hereafter known) is hereby transferred to the ACM (*for Government work, to the extent transferable -see Part B below) effective as of the date of this agreement, on the understanding that the work has been accepted for publication by ACM.
From http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_form.html [acm.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, the APS journals are OK with you putting your version of your paper on the Arxiv [arxiv.org] preprint server; they even allow submission to their journals by Arxiv article number -- they will then download your manuscript from Arxiv and send it to the editors.
I've always been under the impression that the copyright they hold is only to the specific, printed, version they publish, not to any manuscripts you have.
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Hrm.... interesting. However:
Now usually I have read that to mean you can't submit to another journal while you are waiting to hear back from ACS (or vice-versa), but perhaps a public domain release may also violate
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Quantum Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Quantum Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Quantum Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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If I had mod points I'd totally mod you up. But don't you mean it's of immeasurable quantity?
Or Better Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
If any of these journals lose even a fraction of the scientists submitting material in favor of a more-open competitor, then the journal loses, not the scientists.
And never, ever, under any circumstances even consider thinking of assigning copyright to anyone.
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The university officials considering granting you tenure have heard of the big-name journals, but they may not have heard of the amateur production on the web you set up because you actually turned down a chance for publication in a reputable forum.
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There *are* more open journals that allow modified copyright transfers and self-hosted online pu
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This is probably just what the journal is afraid of. While getting published in the major, established, peer reviewed journals, is the current road to tenure, fame, and fortune (except maybe for the fame and fortune), that may not always be the case. One of the most important pieces of the puzzle for the adv
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Stanford algorithms expert, Donald Knuth [stanford.edu](pdf) doesn't like nasty closed-up journals either. As he said when I asked him about it; "Who are you? How did you get in my house?".
Journal elitism (Score:2)
Self-preservation (Score:3, Insightful)
The internet has dramatically changed how information is accessible, and journals must respond to this new paradigm. The idea of a journal still plays an important role - by providing a process of peer review and editing for quality - but it seems the days of paying for paper copies and journals holding sole copyright of individual articles are waning.
Finally, on a related issue, as a taxpayer, why should I have to pay to read about research that I already supported through my tax dollars?
Keeping the buggy whip manufactures alive. (Score:2)
USENIX just made access to its proceedings free (Score:3, Informative)
Start their own (Score:2)
This is stupid. (Score:3, Informative)
Publishing information to WP based on your own work would probably be original research according to WP. Which WP doesn't allow.
Secondly, WP doesn't allow copyrighted work like journals to be posted verbatim on the site--even IF the author grants explicit permission signed in blood and double-notarized to have the material published there too. For WP, it's basically 100% Free or no deal. So, the ONLY way this material could be posted on Wikipedia and stay up for more than 7 minutes with the WP Copyright Police would be if the author released it under GFDL. Which no one wants to do with anything, especially if it's their livelyhood. (I could see licensing a work of mine to Wikipedia, a donation to a nonprofit, but it would piss me off to see that work all over retarded AdSense farms that (legally) steal the content for profit [all-scienc...ojects.com].
And finally, since just posting full text of journal articles is not what WP does (or allows), this whole discussion is stupid. They don't accept full-text of newspaper columns, magazines, or your diary either. It's not a knowledge collective, it's a Freer-than-thou encyclopedia.
What WP does allow is citing these journal articles, and that's something that even our ludicrous current copyright laws has yet to forbid.
Though you can be sure that when citing copyrighted works does get forbidden WP will be the first to knuckle under and ban it, because they have shown in the past that they have no balls to stand up against unjust and overly-broad-interpreted IP laws, for example their complete denial that fair use rights exist.
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Reminds one of the MAFIAA (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, just as with music and video, they see their business model, and fat associated monopoly rents, being threatened.
Just as with the music and video industries, their efforts to stop the rot so far have been risible.
Their case has even less merit since, unlike the music and video inductries, the original authors of the works:
1. Have usually already been paid for their work, and
2. Actively want it be distributed as widely and freely as possible
Indeed, since a lot of (published) science is paid for by our taxes, one could argue 'the public' already owns it / the right to read it freely.
The argument that reputable journals provide a robust peer-review function withers somewhat in the light of many recent scandals that have 'slipped through the net'. The comparison with 'many eyes' from open source sprngs to mind. How long before something really poor or inaccurate is challenged on Wikipedia? Minutes?
Still, that's enough analogies - better stop before I try and slip in a car one, too...
More discussion on topic here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/Eisen.htm [nature.com]
legality versus reality (Score:5, Insightful)
I've published in PRL, back in the 90's. Basically what happened around then was that physicists were some of the earliest adopters of the internet and the web, and as soon as those tools became available, physicists started making their papers available to their colleagues for free in digital form. They still usually referred to them as "preprints," but in fact they'd still be sending them out after the paper had been accepted by the journal, the copyright transfer had been signed, and the paper had come out in print. Also in that era, arxiv.org was set up to archive preprints systematically. For decades now, arxiv has been a vital, ubiquitous part of the infrastructure of physics research; if arxiv is illegal, then I guess every single working physicist in the world is breaking the law every single working day of their career, because that's how much it gets used. The whole thing was sort of a blindingly obvious application for the internet. As an academic, what you care about is getting your research out there so that people know about it -- that's what builds your career. Nobody ever saw any conflict between the fact that (a) you assigned the copyright to the journal, and (b) you were still giving away copies. You might be able to argue that there was no legal conflict, because fair use applied, but realistically everybody saw it as a nonissue, because it was your own work you were giving out, and the journals were nonprofit entities.
What PRL should really reconsider is its whole policy of demanding copyright transfers. All they really need is a license from the author. This is a case where the legalities have lagged a couple of decades behind real-world practices. PRL is the most prestigious journal to get your work published in, but I think they realize that they're essentially expendable at this point at an institution; the minute a sufficient number of physicists get sufficiently upset with them, print journals can find itself replaced rapidly by open-access journals.
Virtually all submissions to PRL are done in LaTeX format, so there is no cost associated with typesetting. All the referees, and nearly all the editors, are unpaid. The printed format is basically obsolete, and the prices charged to libraries are simply ridiculous. This is a classic case where you just have an ossified institution that refuses to change.
Re:legality versus reality (Score:5, Insightful)
PRL persists despite the fact that it has no identifiable purpose. At one time, the idea of a "Letters" journal was for rapid publication of select short articles. Letters journals needed to be selective, so they could operate in an efficient fashion. Ironically, in practice it typically takes much longer to get a paper published in a rapid-publication journal like PRL than in a regular journal like Physical Review, because the referee process is so ponderous. Papers always go to at least two referees, sometimes three or more. In my experience (I have published in and refereed for PRL), this does little to improve the quality of the referee process: it simply makes it more capricious.
Meanwhile, with the advent of arXiv, rapid publication is no longer an issue: by the time a high-quality paper makes it through the review process, it has already been cited a dozen times, and the citing articles have themselves been read and cited. Likewise, there is no longer any point whatsoever to a four-page limit like that imposed by PRL: who cares?
The only reason PRL still exists is the perceived prestige. Having a dozen PRL publications is a gold star on your job application or tenure portfolio, even if those papers are wrong, or poorly cited. Meanwhile, more modern, efficient and useful open access and online journals are poorly indexed by commercial citation services such as ISI Web of Science: even influential, highly cited papers published in these journals count for relatively little with university administration bean counters. And tenure is no insulation from the pressure to publish in letters journals: tenured faculty frequently publish with students and postdocs, and recognize the need for their more junior collaborators to count the proper coup. And so the system perpetuates itself. PRL will continue to matter until the old guys (and they're almost all male) who think it matters die off. Which will be a while.
Parent
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It's like how slashdot always tells people who were libeled to just fix the article. You're not supposed to edit information about yourself.
Libel is covered by the biographies of living persons [wikipedia.org] policy (BLP), and the conflict of interest [wikipedia.org] policy (COI) defers to BLP where they conflict. From COI: