Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
I am afraid that the copyright discussion with Joseph Riolo is at cross-purposes because we are systematically discussing different kinds of texts, different kinds of authors, different kinds of purposes and different kinds of problems. The original question on this thread concerned whether the copyright that an author transfers to the publisher covers the text FORM or the text CONTENT: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1583.html [forwarding from Rainer Stumpe.] Scott Melon asked What is copyrighted - the science or the look? Is there a difference? A little light was cast by Riolo on this question but the emphasis was transfered to Riolo's own suggestion that instead of merely making one's text public online, one should make it public-domain. That strategy and its consequences were not further examined, although I pointed out that this Forum's concern was only with one special, author-giveaway literature, the refereed research literature, for which the strategy of declaring the text to be public-domain before submitting it for publication was not a viable one, because the publisher required at least some limited transfer or license in order to protect on-paper sales. That right would no longer be the author's to provide, if his text were public-domain prior to submission. Questions were also raised about protection from plagiarism (authorship-theft) if a text is public-domain, and it was pointed out that all author concerns about future sales (text-theft) are completely irrelevant for the special literature in question (refereed research). Unfortunately, the replies are non sequiturs, not addressing the very specific, and limited, concerns of this special literature (refereed research), which are to make it public and free on-line, but also to get it refereed and certified as accepted by a journal publisher, and to prevent anyone else from publishing it as if they had been its author. Riolo pointed out that copyright law does not stop you from stealing someone's ideas and publishing them as your own. I pointed out that that was not the issue with text-plagiarism. In reply to my remark: SH But you can't publish his words and claim to be their author. On Fri, 9 Nov 2001 Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com wrote: I can only if the original author sold his whole copyright without any restriction to me. The point that I want to tell you is that the U.S. copyright does not give the author, except for the authors of visual art, the right of authorship. We are talking at cross purposes. Give-away authors (the authors of refereed research papers) do not SELL their copyrights to their publishers, they GIVE them. And they do not seek or get a penny of the revenue from the sales. And the point, to which the statement But you can't publish his words and claim to be their author was a rebuttal, was your point that copyright law does NOT offer protection from plagiarism. That is incorrect. It does, insofar as the verbatim text is concerned. And by way of reply, what you say above is simply a non sequitur. If the author retains the copyright, copyright law protects him against anyone who tries to steal the author's text (by re-publishing it verbatim) or, a fortiori, by re-publishing the text under his own name. The same is true if the author transfers copyright to the publisher. (I certainly haven't heard any cases of publishers publishing a text under anyone else's name than the author's, and this too is too far-fetched a case to bother with when real, substantive matters are it issue, for the the authors of the refereed research papers that are the only ones of concern here.) But the give-away author does not CARE if his refereed research paper is re-published verbatim, or sold, by anyone, as long as the text is uncorrupted and the author's name remains as author. This is the basis of the distinction between protection from text-theft and from authorship-theft for the give-away (as opposed to the non-give-away) author. (Riolo also did not reply to the question about protection from authorship-theft if an author makes his text public-domain [Riolo's recommended strategy]. In replying, there is no point making any mention of potential or actual text-sale revenue, and who holds the rights to it: they are completely irrelevant.) If I publish your paper as my own, I am in violation of copyright in respect to the right to reproduce. It has nothing to do with authorship. If you grant me the permission to copy your paper without any restriction, I can copy your paper and publish it as my own work. I can only repeat: Give-away authors are happy to cede the right to reproduce, but not to reproduce under someone else's name. They accordingly either retain the copyright (which protects against both of these things, only one of which do they care about) or they transfer it to their publishers (who care about both). The case Riolo keeps focusing on (because the
Re: Interview with Elsevier Science
At 12:35 06/11/01 +, Barry Mahon wrote: Richard Poynder wrote: I shall be interviewing Michael Mabe, Elsevier Science's Director of Academic Relations, for a publication called Information Today (www.infotoday.com) next week, and would welcome suggestions from any users as to the kind of questions that they would like to see put to him. Hi Richard, I expect you'll get some pretty unprintable responses from this list!! I would like to ask what Elsevier feels about the movement away from peer review to open archives. Besides feeling threatened which they would not admit, do they feel that (in certain subject areas) the peer review process as a concept is no longer valid? If not why not? For a fascinating independent view on this see Jean-Claude Guédon In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html He tackles exactly this point. It's a long paper (published as a monograph in fact), and you have to read a long way down to find it, but the whole paper is excellent throughout and leads to a full understanding of why publishers like Elsevier are as they are. Steve Hitchcock Open Citation (OpCit) Project http://opcit.eprints.org/ IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 Barry Mahon, Executive Director ICSTI [Moderator's Note: The above posting contains an incorrect enthymeme, which needs to be corrected before it spreads: The Open Archives Initiative OAI (http://www.openarchives.org) is not a movement away from peer review. OAI has nothing at all to do with peer review; it concerns the establishment of metadata tagging standards so that OAI-compliant Online Archives will be interoperable. Nor is the special subset of the Open Archives Initiative dubbed the Self-Archiving Initiative (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm) a movement away from peer review. On the contrary, it is a movement toward the self-archiving of both non-peer-reviewed preprints and peer-reviewed (published) postprints and presupposes the continued practise of peer-review as a condition for publication, the service currently implemented by journal publishers (including Elsevier). Perhaps what Barry Mahon has in mind is the view of certain ArXiv users (http://arxiv.org) who have expressed their own view (http://www.eprints.org/results/2arXivUsersComments.htm) that peer review may no longer be needed (e.g. Greg Kuperberg in this list: The Preprint is the Postprint http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1024.html)? In that case, Elsevier's opposition to that particular subview would be shared by the majority of self-archivers, as well as non-self-archivers (http://www.eprints.org/results/2arXivNonUsersComments.htm), and hence would hardly be informative. It might be more informative to ask Elsevier specifically about their policy regarding online self-archiving of peer-reviewed papers by Elsevier authors, in particular, Elsevier copyright transfer policy on online self-archiving. -- Stevan Harnad, Moderator, American Scientist Forum]
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
I find it very hard to believe that this is an accurate statement of US law! It implies that, if I write a novel and then I choose to sell its copyright absolutely to Stevan Harnad, he can then publish it, not just for his financial benefit, but with Stevan Harnad as author! Surely not. In European Union law the distinction is clear. Copyright, as the term intellectual property implies, is a piece of property that can be bought and sold; so if I sell the right to make copies of my novel to Stevan, he can quite legitimately sell as many copies of it for his sole profit as he likes (but with me identified as author on the title page). But EU law also has moral rights, which have no financial value and are non-transferable, and these include the right of the author to be identified as author of the work. I realise the US law is different, but surely it cannot allow false attribution of authorship? Fytton Rowland. At 05:30 AM 11/9/01 -0500, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: But you can't publish his words and claim to be their author. I can only if the original author sold his whole copyright without any restriction to me. The point that I want to tell you is that the U.S. copyright does not give the author, except for the authors of visual art, the right of authorship. (Let us not get into the technical question of how many words, or how different they have to be to be no longer the author's words. Since we are concerned only with refereed research papers, if you publish my paper as your own, you are in violation of CA. Let's leave the questions of originality, priority, attribution, citation and credit to the referees, editors, patent offices, funding agencies and prize committees. Those are not copyright issues.) If I publish your paper as my own, I am in violation of copyright in respect to the right to reproduce. It has nothing to do with authorship. If you grant me the permission to copy your paper without any restriction, I can copy your paper and publish it as my own work. Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com ** Fytton Rowland, M.A., Ph.D., F.I.Inf.Sc., Lecturer, Deputy Director of Undergraduate Programmes and Programme Tutor for Publishing with English, Department of Information Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK. Phone +44 (0) 1509 223039 Fax +44 (0) 1509 223053 E-mail: j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk http://info.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/staff/frowland.html **
Re: Interview with Elsevier Science
Richard - thanks for the opportunity to comment via the September98 Forum list My department's responsibility includes the library so we have thought about it from both librarian and IT angles. I note also the comments from others to date. Our main qustions would concern: (1) Business model Elsevier see in the future as web-publishing of eprints increases (2) how will they (and other conventional publishers) continue to claim peer-review monopoly (3) how much will they comply with standards such as OAI especially for metadata (4) what is their stance concerning SPARC (5) will they move to leaving copyright with the author and having a licence to publish (6) in e-publishing do they favour PDF (frozen image) or dynamic SGML, XML or HTML (7) do they have interest in dvelopment from dictionaries and thesauri to domain ontologies to assist clssification and retrieval I hope that's enough to be going on with! K -- Prof Keith G Jeffery Director Information Technology and Head Business Information Technology Department k...@rl.ac.uk CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory T:+44 1235 44 6103 Chilton, Didcot, OXON OX11 0QX UK F:+44 1235 44 5831 WWW Person: http://www.bitd.clrc.ac.uk/Person/K.G.Jeffery Department: http://www.bitd.clrc.ac.uk VP VLDB Endowment Board: http://www.vldb.org/ CLRC ERCIM Representative: http://www.ercim.org/ W3C Office at CLRC-RAL http://www.w3.org/ -- The contents of this email are sent in confidence for the use of the intended recipients only. If you are not one of the intended recipients do not take action on it or show it to anyone else, but return this email to the sender and delete your copy of it
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk wrote:
In European Union law the distinction is clear. Copyright, as the term
intellectual property implies, is a piece of property that can be bought
and sold; so if I sell the right to make copies of my novel to Stevan, he
can quite legitimately sell as many copies of it for his sole profit as he
likes (but with me identified as author on the title page). But EU law
also has moral rights, which have no financial value and are
non-transferable, and these include the right of the author to be
identified as author of the work. ...
The U.S. does not have the moral rights for many kinds of works
except for the visual art works. The right of authorship that
is owned by the authors of the works of the visual art cannot be
transferred to other people but can be waived by the authors.
I realise the US law is different, but
surely it cannot allow false attribution of authorship?
As long as the writer understands the consequence and gives up
all of his copyright to the pseudo-author in exchange for money
or other things, that is their business.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
ri...@voicenet.com
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
post in the public domain.
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: I am afraid that the copyright discussion with Joseph Riolo is at cross-purposes because we are systematically discussing different kinds of texts, different kinds of authors, different kinds of purposes and different kinds of problems. When you forwarded your posts to CNI-COPYRIGHT, I assumed that I am allowed to make comments on your comments about copyright. The distinction that you made between the protection against copying of the text and the protection against the false claim of authorship in the same text is not correct in the context of the U.S. copyright. That strategy and its consequences were not further examined, although I pointed out that this Forum's concern was only with one special, author-giveaway literature, the refereed research literature, for which the strategy of declaring the text to be public-domain before submitting it for publication was not a viable one, because the publisher required at least some limited transfer or license in order to protect on-paper sales. That right would no longer be the author's to provide, if his text were public-domain prior to submission. Then, putting a work in the public domain is not for you. (Riolo also did not reply to the question about protection from authorship-theft if an author makes his text public-domain [Riolo's recommended strategy]. In replying, there is no point making any mention of potential or actual text-sale revenue, and who holds the rights to it: they are completely irrelevant.) There is no protection against the false claim of authorship in the public domain works. That is the price of the freedom in the public domain, which is too high for many authors. I can only repeat: Give-away authors are happy to cede the right to reproduce, but not to reproduce under someone else's name. ... In the context of the U.S. copyright, what these authors is actually doing (or supposed to do) is that they impose restrictions on the right to reproduce (i.e. I grant you the permission to reproduce my article as long as you don't copy it and claim that you write it.). They don't give up the right to reproduce unconditionally. Also, they don't retain the right of authorship because it simply does not exist in the U.S. copyright (except for the visual art). Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.
Re: Interview with Elsevier Science
hi richard , I haven't forgotten your email , although I'm immersed in a story about terrorism. I've noticed that harnad's list is very active at the moment discussing issues of copyright. I think that's the unresolved issue for me . and what I think publishers like elsevier have to confront who owns the ideas and information, who can sell it etc..good luck with interview .let me know when it gets published. stan At 16:04 05/11/2001 +, you wrote: Hi, I shall be interviewing Michael Mabe, Elsevier Science's Director of Academic Relations, for a publication called Information Today (www.infotoday.com) next week, and would welcome suggestions from any users as to the kind of questions that they would like to see put to him. Please email any suggestions to me at the email address below. Best wishes, Richard Poynder Richard Poynder Freelance Journalist Phone: 0793-202-4032 E-mail: ric...@dial.pipex.com Web: www.richardpoynder.com
