This is an interesting case where you can improve your negotiating leverage by giving up freedom. Consider a researcher who wants their research to be open access. They can attempt to negotiate this every time they send a paper to a journal, but most researchers are not in a very strong negotiating position relative to the journal. Or they can accept a postdoc position at Princeton, which now means that every time they submit a paper, they must inform the journal that unfortunately they cannot assign copyright.
There are many journals who would be willing to decline to publish the papers of an individual intransigent researcher. There are not many journals who would be willing to ban papers from Princeton entirely.
As an example, Dan Bernstein, who is certainly a well-respected researcher in his field, has individually adopted a policy of dedicating his papers to the public domain so that, like researchers employed by the US Government, he cannot assign copyright in them. The IEEE has consequently decided to reject his papers even when its referees accept them, even though they accept papers from US Government researchers: http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html
This kind of phenomenon, where giving up freedom improves your negotiating position, was extensively studied by Schelling in his theory of negotiation.
It's also very relevant to the debate over Treacherous (or "Trusted") Computing, signed bootloaders, and the like. You might prefer not to have the option of cryptographically certifying to Warner Music that your machine is running an approved operating system on approved hardware. That's because if you have that option, they might not sell you music unless you exercise it, probably giving up many of the rights you have under copyright law; while if you don't have that option, they are faced with a less tempting choice of only selling you a CD.
Advocates of these systems sometimes design systems where you have full freedom to run either signed or unsigned software, claiming that this makes their systems safe from abuse. This overlooks this phenomenon, where having a freedom makes you subject to pressure to exercise it.
This is much more like collective bargaining than giving up freedom. If a researcher individually says I will never assign copyright, then they will never get published. If a group of researchers (let's call it a union) bands together, then they get a lot more negotiating power.
I quite agree, and think that anyone who participates on Hacker News would probably get a lot out of reading Schelling's book The Strategy of Conflict.
A little known fact: the vast majority of grants (by volume of cash) are technically awarded to the professor's university rather than to the professor him/herself, giving the university broad control over the product of the professor's research. At least, this is the case in the life sciences.
From time to time, this yields something good. Props to the grad school I dropped out of :)
This is because to be eligible for a grant, you need to be certified to comply with the federal rules. In most cases, this is done by the university getting the grant, but there are companies that will do this for you for a fee, and even examples where independent researchers have started an "institute" that has been certified. The advantage of the latter alternatives is of course that the administrative overhead is a small fraction of what a large research university charges.
Clicking through to the response from Wiley and Elsevier is interesting.
Wiley: "Naturally, we are concerned that posting the final versions of published articles in Open Access and institutional repositories lacking viable business models may have an adverse impact on the business of scholarly communication."
TL;DR: Universities should continue to pay us, because otherwise we won't make any money.
From a student point of view, this is great news. If you don't have a personal subscription to the digital libraries of IEEE/ACM, the amount of hoops that one has to go through to access a research paper, is apalling. I believe that a peer review system used by journals is beneficial, but putting the papers behind a paywall is obstructing access to knowledge.
If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share it.
The peer review system isn't something that the journals provide. All the review work is done by academics who don't get paid a cent for it. Peer review could be done just as easily if papers were published on free web sites like arxiv.org.
I think "appalling" is a bit of hyperbole. I'm for open access, but students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library. In addition, many/most school have a proxy system so the student can access these resources from home.
The situation is a lot worse for the general public, although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.
I can't say how much I like this ban. For so many times since I left school and wanted to read an article or so, and be greeted with "summary" of that article. I don't really need to pay $25, for the fact that the journal may have obtained the copyright and sold it to some journal sites.
We could use some open-source concepts for paper publishing.
arxiv.org has >700,000 open access articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. It's a great resource.
The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. This can really take a substantial portion of someones time. I don't think it justifies a $25 (sometimes over $40) fee to see an article printed 8 years ago though.
The problem with this approach is that smaller universities can't afford to do this.
I think this problem needs to be adressed at funding agency level, with funding agencies requiring that all publication be made available on the agency's website.
+1 to you, but somebody needed to make the first move, and I think most professors at smaller universities would be happy to publish wherever professors at Princeton are publishing.
From Springer's "copyright transer statement":
An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her institution's and funder's repository at the funder request or as a result of a legal obligation...
Many publishers have a similar clause. My institution (a french research institute) also requires me to put my publications on their public repository and it does not create problems for journals in CS.
Non-false title may be "Princeton bans publishers from handling copyright to journal publishers who ban authors from publishing their articles on their website."
The key word here is "author-created version". After publication you are allowed to put a preprint version of your manuscript on your website but you can't upload the PDF of your final paper. Most people do that anyway but it's technically not allowed.
It's my understanding that research done at government labs comes with a similar restriction, and that it's been standard practice for years for these researchers to reserve copyright on their publications. If that's true, then this will give Princeton researchers the leverage they need to retain copyright to their publications. Even though there's theoretically a waiver process, I'm going to bet that most authors won't want to go through that process, since the work is more valuable to them if they retain the ability to distribute it themselves.
Government employees' work by law is in the public domain:
"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." (17 U.S.C. § 105)
"A 'work of the United States Government' is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties." (17 U.S.C. § 101)
...although I disagree that the pressure to give away copyright is weak. At least in the life sciences, the prestige you get from a publication in, say, Nature or Science is far more valuable than the work alone.
Sometimes I think the academic publishing mechanisms are broken. It takes so much time for your idea and research to be visible... you write the paper, it get reviewed, presented on a conference, published in journals and then months/years later someone actually sees it.
Compare that to the web, where an elaborate blog post and a project on GitHub is enough to become visible to the entire world within hours.
Percentage wise, how much influence did academic papers have on your day to day work in the last year compared to new stuff you found on the web?
I'm trying to understand your concern. While the general public may not interface with new research until it gets published, the researcher's colleagues typically hear about big findings within weeks, or at worst months (conferences).
If you're not in field X, you won't hear about new research until later. But if you're not in field X, how often does it matter that you weren't on the bleeding edge of something in that field?
Is there any reason why publications can't be publicly available before they are reviewed? The journals could still play the same role, highlighting the most significant publications. I'm not an academic so I'm not familiar with the feedback process between a journal and a paper's author. Is there any reason that any refinements couldn't take place in public. A version of github focused on academic papers would seem like a good model.
Perhaps as a counterexample: in my day to day work, I write numerical code. Academic papers are still a better influence as compared to stuff that can be found directly on the web. To be fair, given that a lot more academics are making their work available on their websites, and I can see where this situation might reverse in the not-so-distant future.
In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University.
The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”
Make the application procedure time and effort consuming (Although I can't imagine how university policies could be anything but) and hope to induce researchers to submit to publications that don't require the waiver.
It's a bit unfair to the actual researchers, but if they start putting pressure on the journal publishers -- "Sorry, you've got a high impact factor and I'd love to publish with you, but I can't justify the 2 weeks of fighting with the bureaucracy about a waiver" -- and you might see some progress.
Or their grad students will get another shitty task piled on their list. Hmmmmm.
From the article: "academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”"
That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have access.
I think there still definitely needs to be some sort of filter for academic research. Probably not the journal system anymore but something has to replace it, as most don't have time to trawl through things of questionable quality in the hope of finding something useful.
What I think might be good would be something like this. It's based on the notion that being a good researcher and being good at reading and reviewing research papers are not necessarily the same skill.
1. Have a place for open publication, like arxiv.org, but with a system of non-anonymous commenting and rating. So if someone puts a paper there, others can comment on it and rate it. Ratings could include several categories, such as clarity, importance, rigor, and so on.
2. There should be a system to rate the reviewers.
3. Out of this would emerge a growing collection of reviewers who are recognized as being very good at reviewing papers.
4. Reviewers would start publishing lists of papers they have recently reviewed, broken down by field.
5. Scientists would subscribe to these lists from the top reviewers in their field.
6. Reviewing could become a profession. A researcher who wants to make sure his paper gets attention could pay one or more high rated reviewers to review it. Note that for reviewers it is important to maintain a reputation as an accurate and honest reviewer, which I think would be enough of a safe guard against authors being able to buy good reviews for bad papers.
The existing academic journals could certify only the works that meet their existing publishing criteria, and charge for this service, whilst making all works freely available.
No one is restricted, and everyone knows where to go to avoid having to trawl through the dross themselves.
Princeton is not the first institution to do this, and many publishers have been flexible if you don't want to handle copyright for your work. I think this won't change much because academics are still required to publish in the same journals, and references are made to journal publications instead of web sites. Even today one can easily post papers in their personal website without problems.
I tend to grab the paper title and search for it as a literal string, and in the majority of cases, the only full version available is behind a journal paywall.
Sometimes, especially in CS, you get lucky and find a citeseer or personal-page copy, but anything IEE(E) is pretty rare IME.
1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote.
2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.
4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.
5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation.
6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not.
7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.
8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement.
[Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...]
[+] [-] kragen|14 years ago|reply
There are many journals who would be willing to decline to publish the papers of an individual intransigent researcher. There are not many journals who would be willing to ban papers from Princeton entirely.
As an example, Dan Bernstein, who is certainly a well-respected researcher in his field, has individually adopted a policy of dedicating his papers to the public domain so that, like researchers employed by the US Government, he cannot assign copyright in them. The IEEE has consequently decided to reject his papers even when its referees accept them, even though they accept papers from US Government researchers: http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html
This kind of phenomenon, where giving up freedom improves your negotiating position, was extensively studied by Schelling in his theory of negotiation.
It's also very relevant to the debate over Treacherous (or "Trusted") Computing, signed bootloaders, and the like. You might prefer not to have the option of cryptographically certifying to Warner Music that your machine is running an approved operating system on approved hardware. That's because if you have that option, they might not sell you music unless you exercise it, probably giving up many of the rights you have under copyright law; while if you don't have that option, they are faced with a less tempting choice of only selling you a CD.
Advocates of these systems sometimes design systems where you have full freedom to run either signed or unsigned software, claiming that this makes their systems safe from abuse. This overlooks this phenomenon, where having a freedom makes you subject to pressure to exercise it.
[+] [-] jackpirate|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jforman|14 years ago|reply
From time to time, this yields something good. Props to the grad school I dropped out of :)
[+] [-] lutorm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|14 years ago|reply
Wiley: "Naturally, we are concerned that posting the final versions of published articles in Open Access and institutional repositories lacking viable business models may have an adverse impact on the business of scholarly communication."
TL;DR: Universities should continue to pay us, because otherwise we won't make any money.
[+] [-] movingahead|14 years ago|reply
If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share it.
[+] [-] greenyoda|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessriedel|14 years ago|reply
The situation is a lot worse for the general public, although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.
[+] [-] itsnotvalid|14 years ago|reply
We could use some open-source concepts for paper publishing.
[+] [-] davidblair|14 years ago|reply
The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. This can really take a substantial portion of someones time. I don't think it justifies a $25 (sometimes over $40) fee to see an article printed 8 years ago though.
[+] [-] rb2k_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelthelion|14 years ago|reply
I think this problem needs to be adressed at funding agency level, with funding agencies requiring that all publication be made available on the agency's website.
[+] [-] impendia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lewisham|14 years ago|reply
https://plus.google.com/117898054357703859389/posts/b783VnN4...
[+] [-] arohner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ernesth|14 years ago|reply
Many publishers have a similar clause. My institution (a french research institute) also requires me to put my publications on their public repository and it does not create problems for journals in CS.
Non-false title may be "Princeton bans publishers from handling copyright to journal publishers who ban authors from publishing their articles on their website."
[+] [-] crocowhile|14 years ago|reply
Princeton wants to stop this.
[+] [-] URSpider94|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jforman|14 years ago|reply
"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." (17 U.S.C. § 105)
"A 'work of the United States Government' is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties." (17 U.S.C. § 101)
...although I disagree that the pressure to give away copyright is weak. At least in the life sciences, the prestige you get from a publication in, say, Nature or Science is far more valuable than the work alone.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
Er, hello? If the policy is just a paper tiger, perhaps that fact should go in the title?
I think this is a great step, but if it's largely symbolic, that's a pretty important part of the story and doesn't deserve to be in paragraph 10
I'm left questioning how much is real and how much is spin, which is not where I want to be as a reader.
[+] [-] BonoboBoner|14 years ago|reply
Compare that to the web, where an elaborate blog post and a project on GitHub is enough to become visible to the entire world within hours.
Percentage wise, how much influence did academic papers have on your day to day work in the last year compared to new stuff you found on the web?
[+] [-] carbocation|14 years ago|reply
If you're not in field X, you won't hear about new research until later. But if you're not in field X, how often does it matter that you weren't on the bleeding edge of something in that field?
[+] [-] ollysb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chalst|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|14 years ago|reply
In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University.
The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”
[+] [-] shabble|14 years ago|reply
It's a bit unfair to the actual researchers, but if they start putting pressure on the journal publishers -- "Sorry, you've got a high impact factor and I'd love to publish with you, but I can't justify the 2 weeks of fighting with the bureaucracy about a waiver" -- and you might see some progress.
Or their grad students will get another shitty task piled on their list. Hmmmmm.
[+] [-] a3_nm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amirhhz|14 years ago|reply
That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have access.
[+] [-] robryan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
1. Have a place for open publication, like arxiv.org, but with a system of non-anonymous commenting and rating. So if someone puts a paper there, others can comment on it and rate it. Ratings could include several categories, such as clarity, importance, rigor, and so on.
2. There should be a system to rate the reviewers.
3. Out of this would emerge a growing collection of reviewers who are recognized as being very good at reviewing papers.
4. Reviewers would start publishing lists of papers they have recently reviewed, broken down by field.
5. Scientists would subscribe to these lists from the top reviewers in their field.
6. Reviewing could become a profession. A researcher who wants to make sure his paper gets attention could pay one or more high rated reviewers to review it. Note that for reviewers it is important to maintain a reputation as an accurate and honest reviewer, which I think would be enough of a safe guard against authors being able to buy good reviews for bad papers.
[+] [-] jsmcgd|14 years ago|reply
No one is restricted, and everyone knows where to go to avoid having to trawl through the dross themselves.
[+] [-] chalst|14 years ago|reply
The experience is that the opt-out does get used a fair bit in biomed.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coliveira|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shabble|14 years ago|reply
Sometimes, especially in CS, you get lucky and find a citeseer or personal-page copy, but anything IEE(E) is pretty rare IME.
[+] [-] kragen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StevanHarnad|14 years ago|reply
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.h...
1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote.
2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.
4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.
5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation.
6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not.
7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.
8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement.
[Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...]
Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship
[+] [-] trdlo|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]