Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban

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."

Some journals are still milking both ends

[heteromonomer]

I find it outrageous that some journals are still charging the authors AND the subscribers. As a subscriber I am willing to pay for quality but then don't charge the authors.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Or Better Yet

[maz2331]

Just stop publishing in those journals and create your own. The barriers to entry are pretty low to set up an on-line publication, and even dead tree publishing of scientific papers isn't that expensive.

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.

Re:Some journals are still milking both ends

[blueg3]

It provides motivation to not submit worthless articles. If there's zero cost for submission, then tons of completely useless articles would be submitted, and the cost for going through all of them would be a problem.

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.

Re:Some journals are still milking both ends

[tritonman]

It sounds to me like more people trying to claim intellectual property of something that they did not come up with themselves.

Re:Some journals are still milking both ends

[delt0r]

Some? try almost all. And its worse than that. The editors are not usually paid. The reviewers (as in peer reviewed journal) are not paid. The authors are not paid. Yet the journals gets the copyright and charge *huge* fees for online and physical subscriptions. Journals like nature are the worst for this and charge by far the most. This is why i try to publish in open access journals only.

Self-preservation

[fropenn]

Why would you pay to read an article in a journal if that same information or report were available elsewhere? It is a case of self-preservation on the part of the journal to protect itself from competition.

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?

Re:Some journals are still milking both ends

[gEvil (beta)]

And how many of those authors are doing research with grant money? Including a small dollar amount for "submission/publication" doesn't seem that difficult.

Reminds one of the MAFIAA

[Bearhouse]

The people who publish scientific journals have been mining a lucrative seam for years.
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]

Re:Some journals are still milking both ends

[heteromonomer]

Good point! Someone mod parent up. Charge the authors, charge the subscribers, pay the editors pittance, pay the reviewers nothing, and then claim copyright over the material. This is somewhere between lucrative business and highway robbery.

legality versus reality

[bcrowell]

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:Or Better Yet

[Anonymous Coward]

For obvious reasons, the peers doing reviews are anonymous. It prevents a lot of politics (calling your reviewers and tell them you'll approve theirs if they approve yours). When you publish in PRL, the readers know that the reviewers are coming from a rather well established, scientifically knowledgeable pool. When you publish in Joe's Research Pamphlet, that's not the case. If you break anonymity, then the reviewer name under the authors' names is going to basically look like a co-author, and not seem neutral to the reader who is used to the anonymous, well regarded pool.

I work on a journal [non science]

[tony1343]

I'm fairly high up in a non-science journal (law). In the past it was quite common to ask for a complete transfer [author would no longer own the copyright and journal would]. Most authors have increasingly become less and less comfortable with this. I imagine this is true in non-law journals especially as copyright has become a bigger issue, making authors aware of it.

My journal recently switched from such an outright transfer to something along the lines of an exclusive license for 1 year and license after [with attribution to us afterwards]. So basically we want to be the first to publish it and we don't want it to be anywhere for a limited period of time. I think something along these lines is fair. Obviously, its the authors work, but the journals do a ton of work. Authors don't just submit and then journals publish. The articles are edited intensely and all the citations are checked to make sure the author is quoting correctly and drawing correct conclusions. This process I guess would be different with science journals, but they have to get the article peer-reviewed and I imagine there still would be intensive editing, since often scientists are not the best writers or are foreign, which my journal deals with quite often [though I doubt that the articles will have 300-800 footnotes like non-science articles do].

Anyway, some type of middle ground needs to be reached. Obviously, the journal doesn't want the same article to be published in a different journal 2 months later (at least not without its permission). If an author simply takes the paper after its gone through the extensive editing process and posts it on Wikipedia or wherever, that takes away the incentive for anyone to subscribe and the process isn't free (well law journals are done by students for free usually, but not all are and there are still many costs). But I definitely support the author being able to post his article after a certain amount of time (in fact most authors have their articles as a "working paper" online before we publish it and we don't care).

I think the license approach works pretty well. Also, remember that whether the journal likes it or not there is "fair use" and the science itself is not copyrightable just the expression (though I doubt the author is going to want to write the same thing twice). "Fair use" is often difficult because huge corporations will sue anyway and that is expensive, but I doubt this would be the case with academic journals, which don't have that type of budget.

So I'd just like to dispel any myth that journals do nothing. It's a give and take relationship. Journals need good authors to exist and become more prestigious and get more subscribers. But authors need journals so they can become well published, and thus become tenured, respected in the field, and reach an audience.

Re:legality versus reality

[PvtVoid]

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.

Re:Some journals are still milking both ends

[tsa]

That's a good point, but then I want at least 200 dollars for every paper I review.

Re:Maybe I'm in the wrong field

[rangek]

Ah a loophole. If there is no copyright, it cannot be transferred. So release your papers into the public domain before you submit them to the ACS and you can do whatever you want with them.

Hrm.... interesting. However:

This manuscript will be considered with the understanding you have submitted it on an exclusive basis.

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 this too. Also see jschen's comment [slashdot.org] about embargo. It might not be possible to make a meaningful "release ... into the public domain" without running afoul of one of both of these stipulations (in as much as they are separate).

Re:Or Better Yet

[mikeabbott420]

A lot of research is publicly funded so the solution to the problem should be easy. Make that funding reflect the interests of the vast majority of people by being contingent on publishing without ridiculous limitations. Peer review journals have an important filtering,editing,fact checking etc purposes but it is a very small tail wagging a very large dog if they try to support themselves by limiting access to public research in order to gain a perceived advantage in selling paper. The journals will adapt to what has been the de facto situation for a long time.