My little trip distracted me with the perfect timing to miss the amazing fair-use flare-up — I’m back just in time to catch the happy resolution. I guess I’ll say something anyway, but I’ll be brief.
The general question is whether blogs should be restrained from using figures and data published in scientific journals. My position is that we should use them — scientific information should be freely and widely disseminated, anything else is antithetical to the advancement of science. The only constraints I think are fair is that all material taken from a journal should be acknowledged and formally cited, and that dumping whole articles to the web should not be done. It wouldn’t be appropriate for our audiences anyway; we should be explaining and synthesizing, not blindly replicating.
I’m glad it has blown over for now, at least. Let’s hope journals continue to be sensible about letting blogs excerpt portions of published work—they have a specialized audience, we have a more general audience, and we hope that blogging about science will lead to more scientists, which will increase the market for the science journals. Everyone will be happy!
Thanks for commenting, PZ. :)
That sounds good to me.
Personally, I think that all scientific articles should be in the public domain. After all, most of it is funded by the tax payer. Why should someone who has cancer have to pay 40 bucks to get a reprint of a paper discussing her medication?
I think it brings up the larger question of whether academic journals should be subscription-based in the first place. Obviously this particular incident had a “simple” solution which isn’t quite the same as who should own the intellectual property that is scientific work.
It kind of galls me when I put my blood, sweat and tears into a research project, with my salary and the cost of the equipment and materials paid for by grants almost entirely funded by taxpayer money and the end of the whole process, the entity that owns the copyright for the work is a private publishing firm?!?! Even the peer-reviewing is done by researchers in the field who are not paid. And subscription costs aren’t cheap…a lot of small schools have to make some really tough decisions about journal subscriptions.
Anyway, I know it’s not quite the same issue as fair-use, but this subject always hits a nerve with me. And I know there’s been some discussion of this point in the larger scientific circles as well, so I’m curious what you think.
According to the ACS website you can read my papers for free 70 years after I die, when copyright expires.
Still another 18 years to go before you can read work from this ‘Albert Einstein’ guy for free. I hear he’s got some interesting ideas.
I don’t know if copyright ever made sense for scientific material. Science has other systems (review and slander ;-) that prohibits outright copy theft.
Online open-access journal PLoS has an interesting copyright:
This goes beyond PZ’s sound recommendations on replication, but I think “distribute” encompass linking here.
Hopefully the lither forms of online journals, archives and copyleft will diminish the old mammoth publishers. This incident shows one reason why it would be good.
Good argument, bad example. AE’s original papers are available at Einstein Archives Online and Einstein Papers Porject.
I haven’t checked, but I believe his papers from his “miracle year” has been available online for a while.
I don’t know if copyright ever made sense for scientific material. Science has other systems (review and slander ;-) that prohibits outright copy theft.
Online open-access journal PLoS has an interesting copyright:
This goes beyond PZ’s sound recommendations on replication, but I think “distribute” encompass linking here.
Hopefully the lither forms of online journals, archives and copyleft will diminish the old mammoth publishers. This incident shows one reason why it would be good.
Good argument, bad example. AE’s original papers are available at Einstein Archives Online and Einstein Papers Porject.
I haven’t checked, but I believe his papers from his “miracle year” has been available online for a while.
But but but but but…
They were going to make a major motion picture based on that graph! And now, with the surprise gone, no one in Hollywood will touch it! Is that fair? Is it? (Excuse me for not typing in all caps).
BAH! IMO, we should do away with the notion of “Intellectual property” entirely, and replace it with “intellectual services” instead. Copyrights and patents would be seen as a temporary legal monopoly on providing those services, so you’d have the same basic legal framework, the copyright and patent holders would still profit, but the metaphor changes, and we can do away with the idiotic notion that intangible information can be “owned”.
PZ said:
Although I’m usually a PZ Myers sycophant, I can’t agree with the good professor on this. Whether scientific (or any other) information should be freely and widely disseminated is a matter for the creator of that information. It shouldn’t be decided by the “scientific community” or even high quality science bloggers.
In fact, this is exactly what the framers thought when they included the included the Intellectual Property Clause into the Constitution:
(emphasis added)
This whole flare-up, to me, appears to be much ado about nothing. Keep in mind that the publishing company employees are probably sending out a form letter to any possible infringer and may lack the legal training to differentiate reasonable examples of fair use.
Yes, authors and inventors. Not Elsevier.
And you are always free not to publish anything if you want to keep your data a secret from the rest of the world.
The authors of the study were not forced to publish their study using Elsevier or any other publisher. It was their choice, likely because they thought a professional publisher would create some nice looking graphs and get their study out to those who were the most interested in it.
If the authors of the study wanted to publish it themselves, they could have tossed it up on the Internet or ran off copies and dropped them in to the mail themselves. But they didn’t. So don’t blame a publisher for expending money to create graphics, typeset the article, print and bind the journal, and pay for postage, and then expect not to get paid in return.
dynaboy: Spoken like a true libertarian!
But, isn’t there such a thing as a social responsibility? Should a cancer patient really have to pony up 40 bucks for a review article regarding the medicine she takes? Should a bright 15 year old have to pay the same amount to read about the latest scientific literature? What about someone who wants to find out the facts about global warming?
Also, scientists do most of the typesetting and figure creation themselves nowadays and the rise of the internet has pushed down distribution costs to fractions of a penny.
Publishing costs are not absorbed by publishers. They make authors do that. Authors pay per-page fees as well as exorbitant fees for color figures, which vary by the journal. However, Abel at Terra Sigilla mentioned getting tagged for $650 fee, for just one figure.
Oh, that those figures are usually made by the authors, not the journal. No publisher has ever made a figure, chart, or graph for me (not to say it never happens though). Want reprints, as an author (just YOUR paper, not the whole journal)? Be prepared to pay upwards of $10+ per print, and much more if you want it in color.
Don’t forget who ultimately pays for all these fees: you the taxpayer. Research grants have portions set aside for publication costs, and universities (taxpayer supported) provide help to defray costs from absorbing too much of that grant dough.
So, really, the people who pay for the research (taxpayers) are being told they cannot have access to the results of this support. Just saying, there’s no ‘poor publishers’ here. They’ve got a great deal, its the scientists and taxpayers who are getting the raw deal.
In this case though Shelly properly credited the authors and cited their work. She posted a summary of the work and actually tried to clear up misunderstandings in the media surrounding it. She wasn’t posting the work in its entirety or even posting much of it, only a summary. No more than any newspaper was publishing. Anyone that wanted to read the full article was forwarded on to the published work.
I don’t see how that was taking anything away from the publisher or the authors. In fact, it was encouraging people to read the published work.
I’m glad it ended well, but why was she seen as the criminal in the first place? I think some corporations are going too far with intellectual property rights and it’s our job to keep them in check. The rude emails aren’t good, but I’m glad the corporation did hear from people who thought their threat of lawsuit was excessive.
Are Elsevier the culprits?
If you truly want to bury any paper- publish it in an Elsevier journal. No-one will read it, your institution probably won’t have an electronic copy- or if they do, the Elsevier websites are so bad you’ll never be able to find it.
One of these days, I’m hoping someone arguing that copyrights as we know them are obvious, beneficial, and inevitable will give me a good reason to take their arguments more seriously than those of people making the same arguments about divine-right monarchy. So far, I’ve been disappointed.
What I would support in terms of copyright: the right to proper attribution forever, and exclusive right to commercial exploitation for a reasonable period (multiple human lifetimes is not “reasonable”). Additionally, software lacking content analogous to art/literature (certain story-based games, for instance) should be covered exclusively under patents, not copyrights. Also, organizations making materially false claims about copyright law to their benefit should perhaps be subject to some kind of liability…
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make papers subscription limited for a time – it does cost money to print them and maintain the databases, after all, and there has to be some way to recoup the costs. I don’t think everyone at Elsevier would be willing to work for free. Elsevier makes far too much, but they’re the exception. I’m thinking of society pubs like the American Journal of Botany – they’re not really making money, but they do still have to charge something to make ends meet. I like the delayed JSTOR type access – once a year has gone by, then it’s freely available. That way they can recoup costs from the libraries and people who have to have it now, but it goes into the public domain fairly quickly. That also bolsters the argument from bloggers – if they publicize new papers, that adds to the revenue stream from readers who saw the blurb about it and want it now.
Besides,
Yes, and what will she do with it? If I had cancer, would reading specialized medical papers make me feel better?
It depends. Physical Review did not charge me for my paper.
For those crying out loud, haven’t you guys heard about preprint servers?
Maybe. My friend had a particularly aggressive form of post-transplant lymphoma (cancer), about which there were only ~40 reported cases in the literature, all of whom died quickly. He (a biomedical informaticist) and his wife (a radiologist, so they were both med-info-literate) researched the literature and found that there were 2 cases of multi-year (2? 5? I forget) survival based on a different treatment regime than the standard, and brought this information to his oncologist, who happened to have just come across the same information at about the same time. Based on that, together they chose a particular chemotherapy and bone-marrow transplant treatment plan that was not the standard one (which had basically a 100% failure rate).
It bought him a little time, not much; unfortunately, he did not become the 3rd success story in the literature. But he felt he made a fully-informed decision about his treatment options, based on the most current literature.
With all due respect, that’s an over broad statement. Of course taxpayers have “access” to the paper. For instance, all you have to do is wander down to a library that carries the journal and pick it up off the shelf. (You could even wander down to the photocopier and make a full copy for a 10 cents a sheet, but don’t tell anyone…)
The question here isn’t about access, it’s about reproduction, the very “copy right” that is vested with the author and/or his or her assignee.
But as I said in my original post (#8), your whole issue got overblown, probably due to an overzealous clerk. It appears you were well within your fair use rights to copy portions of the article for the purpose of critical comment. Obviously, once a competent individual from the publisher stepped in, everything was a-OK.
Personally, I believe the whole paper journal method of distributing scientific research is an outdated relic. I don’t see any reason why peer review and publication can’t be done via the Internet. But it’s not up to me to force this change, it’s up to the scientists.
You vastly overestimate the probability of the local library carrying a specialized journal. The Seattle Public Library, for example, does not carry Oncogene or Bacteriological Reviews. For such journals, you need access to a specialized medical library, and even if one is in “wandering down” distance, not every one permits access to their resources to the public.
As a journalist, it is extremely frustrating to have so many papers behind paywalls. There is no way whatsover that I or my publication could pay for access to all the journals, nor even for the per-paper costs which I’d run up when researching just one article. Most researchers are happy to send me copies via email when I ask, although I’m never sure of the legitimacy of that, but finding the researchers, sending the email, waiting for the timezones to waft past and getting the response is a huge delay – especially when everyone else has got the story up, and you may well want to dig further depending on what you find out. Something that should take five minutes takes a day.
As so much mainstream science reporting suffers from a lack of context, this is actively harmful.
R
Christian Burnham wrote:
I take that as a compliment. I think…
Sure there’s a thing as social responsibility. But shouldn’t this responsibility rest on the shoulders of the scientist who willingly publishes his work in a journal that charges $40 for a copy? I can’t force the the scientist to do the “socially responsible” thing of posting his work on the Internet for all can view free of charge…
I never asserted that a local library would carry a specialized journal. While you may be correct that the Seattle Public Library does not carry Oncogene, the nearby University of Washington library does.
All major public libraries and many minor public libraries have an interlibrary loan service that will obtain articles from other libraries. Most do not charge the requester except in extreme circumstances.
It was nice of Wiley to grant permission for a limited degree fair use, as if it were their choice.
Back when I was in library school, I came across SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition). From their About page:
Lots of academics are and have been getting very annoyed at the crooked-record-company-like tactics that publishers have been using with science journals (since they have to publish, and their libraries have to buy, the publishers often set really obnoxious terms, as amply noted above).
One example of a SPARC project (done in collaboration with a University of Arizona professor, though it now seems to be supported by the University of Wisconsin) is the Journal of Insect Science, which started as an online publication and now seems to have a print edition, as well.
From their about page:
They have a good section on the problems with academic publishing, including A Call For Change in Academic Publishing
Sorry this got so long, but there was lot to cover, even as an introduction.
Unfortunately, for tenure purposes, most professors must publish in expensive, peer-reviewed journals.
We just paid 900 $ for a color figure in Systematic Biology.
Maybe, maybe not. Spoken like one who has never tried to publish a scientific article.
The universities I know have online subscriptions to most Elsevier journals, and I’ve downloaded lots of papers that way. Where is “your institution”?
Now, if you want to bury a paper, publish it in any language other than English in the in-house publication of some small local museum. Even the publications of medium-sized regional US museums can be quite hard to get.
Heard we have. There simply is no preprint server in biology.
Indeed it can be. http://palaeo-electronica.org
Very well said.
We just paid 900 $ for a color figure in Systematic Biology.
Maybe, maybe not. Spoken like one who has never tried to publish a scientific article.
The universities I know have online subscriptions to most Elsevier journals, and I’ve downloaded lots of papers that way. Where is “your institution”?
Now, if you want to bury a paper, publish it in any language other than English in the in-house publication of some small local museum. Even the publications of medium-sized regional US museums can be quite hard to get.
Heard we have. There simply is no preprint server in biology.
Indeed it can be. http://palaeo-electronica.org
Very well said.
Then we read the following very differently:
I’m not sure how a taxpayer in the rural Midwest finds a library with those journals “on the shelf” to “wander down to” and read about research her tax dollars pay for. You must be including “take a plane to a city with a reasonable medical library” as part of “wander”, and “register for access privileges” as part of “shelf”.
I was with you up until that point. Patents cover functionality, so writing a program that does the same thing as another program would become forbidden. That is simply unacceptable.
Copyright isn’t actually a bad fit for software, it’s just that the current copyright system is bad for everything.
There wasn’t one in physics either until the physicists sat down and made one.
And the arxiv does have a “quantitative biology” section at http://arxiv.org/archive/q-bio
While that’s not going to cover all of biology, there is a small bit of coverage.
Captain C: “Unfortunately, for tenure purposes, most professors must publish in expensive, peer-reviewed journals.”
But they still can publish the same results on the net. I do.