Nature lets authors keep copyright

oever writes "In the latest issue of Nature, it says that the copyright for all articles published by the Nature Publishing Group will remain with the article's authors. (I guess I'll have to publish in Nature from now on.) However, to publish an article in Nature, you still have to agree on some limitations with respect to publishing the article in other media. For example, you can put a PDF on you webpage but it's not allowed to add the article to an archive (Google cache?)."

Finally

[Xner]

Good to see that a major publication realised the threat that collaborative efforts would pose to its business model in the long run, and decided to take pro-active steps to decrease the discontent among its contributors.

I think it is a wonderful example not only for other journals (Nature is pretty much The Jounal, and if Nature can do it, other publishers are going to seriously consider it), but also for other industries that, when new developments threaten their business model, react in ways that are much more defensive and, ultimately, irritating for all concerned.

Re:Finally

[guerby]

The Nature grant of some rights is a joke, see below from the FAQ. You have no right to reuse your own article excepted in printed paper form, yeah. The way is still long until science and public interest recovers from these thieves...

How can I show my article to my colleagues?

By sending a link to the paper on your website. You may not distribute the PDF by email, on listservs or on open archives. Please remember that although the content of the article is your copyright, its presentation (i.e. its typographical layout as a printed page) remains our copyright.

Interpretation.

[Xner]

You have no right to reuse your own article excepted in printed paper form, yeah.

It might be me, but I see nothing of the kind in the license. What I do see however are the magic words "Ownership of Copyright remains with the authors", provided that when reproducing the contrubution the journal is acknowldged and referenced.

It is not entirely clear to me why the Authors should need to retain any "non-exclusive rights" since they are still the owners of the copyright. My guess is that they left it in from the previous version for clarity.

The restrictions on the reproduction of the original PDF and printed paper stem from the fact that the typesetting constitutes a derivative work by the Nature Publishing Group. You are however free to distribute your contribution to the paper (without nature's formatting, e.g. re-latexing it) in whatever way you please. As far as I can tell, it is completely unencumbered.

Re:Interpretation.

[Snowhare]

No - it is SEVERELY encumbered. The very first paragraph of the license [nature.com] basically says "You give us the exclusive right for any existing or future paper, electronic, or undiscovered forms of distribution of this article until the copyright expires. Oh yeah - ditto for all derivative works (translations, summaries, etc)."

The second para then says, "But you can print it on paper or post it on your own website or use it in teaching at your university."

And this is different from giving Nature the copyright and them then granting the original author an extremely restricted license exactly how?

This smells more like Nature is scared that someone is going to figure out a way to say "Nature - you don't own the electronic rights on papers published in your magazine - and never did. Too Bad." Something like the LEXUS-NEXUS fiasco where the courts held that LEXUS-NEXUS has improperly stolen authors works by redistributing them electronically beyond the original paper publication. And so they have come up with a creative way of trying to put contract law on their side while still spinning it as "We are good guys! Really!"

Re:Finally

[Zocalo]

I think you missed a point (or I have) as the "distribute the PDF by email..." bit is a bit vague - what does "the PDF" mean, exactly? The text of the article submitted as a PDF, or a PDF of the pages actually in the printed Magazine? There's a big difference.

What I think Nature is saying is that you retain copyright of the article, and presumably any illustrations you submitted, but Nature retains copyright of the layout and any illustations they added. This seems perfectly fair to me, provided that it does indeed mean that I could post the ASCII representation, or even my own layout, of my article to all and sundry.

There is also the "fair use" issue of photocopying articles in publications of course, but that's another point, and the restrictions there are pretty well known.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

What's funny is Nature and other journals make you do most of the layout work yourself. They decide were to break the text to fit in the figures and add page numbers. That's it. The submiter has to get the fonts perfect and do all the typesetting work and then we can't put the PDF online so that people without subscriptions can read it.

At least this lets up put the text and figures online exactly as they appear in the article.

Re:Finally

[guerby]

I took the time to read the license and I your analysis of the FAQ might be correct, but the wording of the License (talking about Contribution, probably not a PDF) and the FAQ (talking about the PDF on Nature web site) are both quite poor and inconsistent.

Supposing the Contribution is an ASCII text (simple email), Nature will build a PDF that the author can put on its own web site (and has other print rights). Now by signing the License to Publish the exclusive rights to publish the Contribution - see 1(a) of the license - are given to Nature by the author, so it's not clear that's just PDF layout stuff, the author might not be able to do anything at all with its own original ASCII text.

Well, we'll see what happen when an author decides to put its original contributed text in an online archive.

"no archive"

[g4dget]

Publishing has a notion of "archival publication". Traditionally, if several libraries held copies, it was archival. Today, that function is also fulfilled by services like Arxiv.ORG. An archival publication can be cited as such. Nature probably wants to avoid that there are multiple archival copies of a paper.

I'm not sure I like the restriction, but at least I can understand why a traditional publisher or librarian might want to impose it.

The Google cache shouldn't be a problem, and Citeseer shouldn't be a problem either (it doesn't try to be archival, as far as I can tell).

Google cache is not an archive

[ivan256]

When a page goes away, it expires from the google cache some finite period of time afterward. It's not an archive, it's a cache.

We need a new peer-review system

[Dachannien]

What is really needed is a new free peer-review system where authors can post peer-reviewed papers on their website complete with a digital signature to verify that their paper has been reviewed and accepted much as it would be for a traditional publication like Nature.

More than anywhere else, information in the scientific community wants to be free. I hope that the scientific community finally takes up the banner of technology developed in the 1990s, and uses that technology to ensure that verified and reviewed information becomes free for all.

IANAL, however...

[Spock the Baptist]

After reading the NPG's License to Publish I believe that the author/s of articles submitted to NPG do not give up the copyright to the words, figures, and tables which were submitted by the author/s, but merely the copyright of the layout of the article published by NPG.

In other words you can take the words, figures, and tables that you submit, and rearrange them and then republish them, and be in the clear as far as NPG is concerned.

Peer-Reviewed Journals

[jat2]

Non-exclusive transfer of copyright is not unheard of in the world of peer-reviewed journals. Personally, I am an applied mathematician, and I (and many colleagues) have had articles published in the SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) [siam.org] journals. They have a simple non-exclusive transfer of copyright that allows the authors to retain all their copyright priviledges, including the right to make your work publicly available. Furthermore, the SIAM people provide editing services, and send you back the LaTeX source for the final draft, which you can then compile (to pdf, ps, dvi, etc) and post on your web site.

Of course, SIAM is a nonprofit research and teaching professional organization. All journals are peer-reviewed, at very little cost to the society. However, since I completed my Ph. D., I have been strongly considering refusing to submit my original research to any journals that do not offer similar non-exclusive copyright transfers. While I was working on my Ph. D., my advisor had a great deal of say as to which journals we submitted.

It may seem like an obvious thing to do (i.e., submit to an "open" peer-reviewed journal). However, most young researchers are looking for tenure, and get tenure (at predominantly research oriented schools) by having many of their articles published in top-tier journals. Unfortunately, this openness is rare among the top-tier journals. (SIAM is an exception.)

Re:Peer-Reviewed Journals

[MouseAnony]

Also on a related issue most of these open journals still have not managed to get the kind of image among normal researchers, students etc necessary. Other then the obvious image of being able to say you had an article published in Nature/whatever, there is also the issue of popularity. Many students etc are far less likely to find your article if it's in one of these open journals. Furthermore, many are less likely to trust the content. And it usually isn't just the student's loss. I things will eventually change, but it's not going to happen overnight. What you must realise is the reason people usually trust the journals is because they can be trusted. This doesn't mean that the open journals can't be trust, just that they don't yet have enough history/background. Having a good article will help but of course, most people will still want to publish their good articles in well regarded and well read journals.

Quantum physics has a copyright

[yerricde]

I thought there was no such thing as copyright in nature, and that it was a human invention!

It's impossible to clone the exact quantum state of a particle. This fact from quantum physics forms the basis of future secure communication: crypto based on XOR against an eavesdrop-evident one-time-pad generator powered by entangled particles.

Nurture lets authors keep copyright...

[Hubert_Shrump]

Parenting declared illegal by Jack Valenti.