I thank Gavin for his advice. I think Sarah Frias-Torres dealt with this,
but I gather that if anyone downloads one of my copyrighted PDFs to use as
the screenplay for a movie or the lyrics of a pop song, that would be a
violation. But only a PDFile would do that.
As a former civil rights worker I confess to many acts of civil disobedience
and violation of unjust laws. We are facing a stiuation where science and
scientists are really suffering - at a time when we are trying to encourage
the spread of intellectual activity in the developing world, the
increasingly difficult access to journals restricts good research in many
fields only to those in wealthy institutions. "Attempt[ing] to negotiate"
from a postion of weakness is not going to lead to prompt reform.
The arrogance of the journals can be hard to believe. I once wrote a paper
which I circulated as a preprint, which one of my friends showed to a
leading figure in the field who edited a prestigious journal - he called me
up and asked if I would let him publish it in his journal. I was of course
delighted! But now that my reprints are exhausted and I want to send out
PDFs, they won't even give me one for my own use - they want to charge me 30
euros! And this for a paper published over 30 years ago.
Unfortunately we cannot count on all of our scientific colleagues for
support in fighting this. I remember once a talk by a distinguished Spanish
scientist, one of Ramon Margalef's most famous students, who had to admit
that due to a limited equipment budget the data were not quite as complete
as could be wished. Another scientist from a wealthier institution (in the
UK Gavin, in the UK) sniffed that scientists from the poorer countries
shouldn't be working on problems that the wealthy labs could handle better.
I am sure that he would share Gavin's concerns about making science more
widely available through piracy.
In any case, I do not think that the way that many of us distribute PDFs of
our own work constitutes "rampant disregard for copyright law". But as soon
as one of my papers provides the lyrics for the theme song of a Hollywood
movie about the fuzzy evaluation of environmental impacts I promise to
reconsider.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gavin Simpson" <gavin.simp...@ucl.ac.uk>
To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU>
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Open Access and Intellectual Imperialism Approval
required
On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 11:14 -0400, Alexey Voinov wrote:
Instead of or in addition to boycotting and protesting, I think there is
a much
simpler and effective solution. Ask your kids. If they can share their
music,
why can't we share our papers? It's called peer-to-peer technology and
requires
just a little bit of good will from ourselves. All we need is to assemble
our
collections of pdf articles that I bet each and everyone of us has on our
hard
disks, and make them available for sharing.
Students are already doing this. See this article:
http://eaves.ca/2009/04/28/education-where-copyrighters-and-publishers-are-the-pirates/
Unfortunately these efforts seem to be sharing the fate of Napster,
attacked by
lawsuits. However this can and will still develop without any centralized
services on a peer-to-peer basis as supported by bit-torrent and other
software.
So it's really up to us to make it happen.
Only if you condone copyright theft.
Invariably, journals do not grant you a non-exclusive right to do
anything with your own publications that you might have in PDF format.
Sometimes they allow you to post to a website your final version before
journal formatting. Sometimes a journal may allow you to do this only
after a certain period of time, or they may allow you to post their
version of the manuscript on your (or your institutes's) website after a
period of time (6-12months say). It all depends upon what rights you
signed away when you completed your copyright transfer form.
Reproducing or distributing any publications that are not your own, that
are not covered by a licence that allows you to do this, provided to you
by the publisher of said content, would also constitute copyright theft.
Circumventing these restrictions, could, in some countries, be
considered violation of copyright laws. Doing this with software in the
US for example cold make you fall foul of the DMCA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
Whilst I'm no fan of the current predominant publication model, nor many
of the associated citation indices, rampant disregard for copyright law
is *not* the way to solve these problems.
You should exercise your right to do with your work (i.e. your final
draft, not a journal compilation/formatting of your work) as you see
fit, and publish it in journals that have more open policies regarding
works published by them. Or try to retain some of the rights you wish
for, for example by attaching a Creative Commons Scholars Copyright
Addendum to the publisher's copyright transfer forms, in an attempt to
negotiate retaining some rights:
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/
So it's really up to us to make it happen.
So, I agree with the sentiment, but not with the means by which you
suggest we go about it.
G
