Sinabro

Perhaps we should considerably reduce the power of copyright in academic journals (via Slashdot), but we should do it through reasoned discourse, not mindless fear-mongering:

We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights.

Oh, please. Data is not copyrighted. I am fairly sure they are not even copyrightable in most cases, even though a particular presentation of the data might be, especially if it shows some evidence of creativity. One must be either fairly stupid or have a really horrible legal department to get an idea that data in a published journal article is copyrighted and cannot re-use or even cite the data (who wouldn’t want citation? citation increases the impact factor of the journal) without “re-doing the experiment”. (Say, how does one know whether the “new data” is from new experiment or the old one? Aren’t they supposed to be the same within experimental error?)

Of course, I can only speak for the situation in physics, but I am fairly sure the situation is as bleak as presented in this page, at least not in natural sciences. APS (which does retain copyright) and Nature (which does not retain copyright) both allow the author to do pretty much whatever they want with the author-formatted preprints of the article. The allowances are less on the journal-produced, professional versions of the article, but that’s understandable (that particular copy represents the combined effort of the author and editor) and does not have that much impact on open access as long as one doesn’t mind the amateurish document formatting by many scientists (just look at arXiv.org).

On the whole, I do think copyright in U.S. does need to be reformed, and particularly so in academic journal publishing (textbooks have … different goals so it’s not so clear whether academic textbooks should be treated any differently from other books). But we will gain nothing by inciting unreasonable fear in the sheeple and eroding our own credibility. After all, don’t we believe that our cause is strong enough to prevail when we present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as well as it can be determined from data and statistics, anyway) to the public?