Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban 155
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."
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
USENIX just made access to its proceedings free (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wikipedia:No_Original_Research (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:4, Informative)
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 paper accepted, and then turning around and posting the content somewhere else so no-one has to subscribe to the journal. Also note that in any case we're only talking about copyright, and hence the text of the paper, not the scientific content.
That said, I think the policy is silly. First of all, APS journals will already accept material that's already been posted on the arXiv [arxiv.org] (compare with Science and Nature which only take stuff that's never been presented before, even in a seminar talk). All the journal needs is a license from the authors. There's nothing wrong with the authors giving the journal an exclusive license to publish the article journal-style, as long as the authors retain the ability to post works derived from the article in other fora.
Re:This is stupid. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field (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.
Re:Some journals are still milking both ends (Score:3, Informative)
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.