The n-Category Café

Thanks, John. Also, I applaud the decision yesterday by the EASD (European Association for the Study of Diabetes) to publish one week prematurely a variety of different articles showing an apparent statistical link between insulin glargine and cancer.

EASD made these articles fully accessible to anyone via their website and the website of their journal called Diabetologia which is a highly reputable journal.

As a professional level member of the MIT Energy Club, I also support the idea of making non-classified DOE funded research more accessible to the public.

Surely the older the articles, the more argument for making them free, due to the difficulty of obtaining new copies. An example: I couldn’t get my library to buy Ehresmann’s complete works, published as supplements to the Cahiers, even though at the time we had a subscription, but neglected to buy them. Thankfully they will soon be available on NUMDAM. I’m also grateful for services like JSTOR, but that’s only helpful as I’m at uni.

Or are the policy wonks motivated by the cutting edge research that is outdated after 12 months, so is clearly superfluous? You know the fields I mean.

Actually that was a poor example, but think of all the category theory work funded by the NSF…

Presumably the limitation of this requirement to new research is largely a matter of feasibility. If I am required to put my future work on a public archive, I can do that. But who’s going to do the work to put all the papers supported by NSF, etc., over the past several decades, much of it done by researchers who are now retired or deceased, on an archive? Think how much work it would be even to determine which papers those are.

It would probably be difficult politically to have a retroactive provision in the bill. Opponents will get people to testify that they accepted a grant without any indication that their work would be posted online etc; politicians don't like to make the fight any harder than it has to be.

It would be an incredibly controversial if a bill proposed to take vast amounts of copyrighted material — material for which publishers own all the rights — and suddenly make it freely available to the public. It would basically be saying “Hey! You publishers, who thought that copyright law guaranteed you all rights to this stuff? Well, you don’t! Copyright law as you know it is gone.”

Every publisher and every media company would fight this to the death.

On the other hand, it requires no rewrite of copyright law to say that when you accept a government grant, you agree to deposit a copy of anything you write under that grant in a freely accessible database. You do this when you still own the copyright, before you sign it over to the publisher.

However, every journal publisher will still fight this bill. And they will argue, as they already have, that this bill is a massive rewrite of copyright law.

Don’t forget that Conyers’ bill to overturn the current National Institute of Health open access policy is called the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act. There’s a reason for that! As Peter Suber wrote:

In an earlier joint statement (April 2008), before the Conyers bill was introduced, the American Association of Publishers and the DC Principles Coalition asserted that the NIH policy denied “authors and publishers the benefits of their copyrights…”

The DC Principles Coalition, the American Association of Publishers, and the Copyright Alliance all say that the NIH policy “forces publishers to surrender their copyrighted scientific journal articles….” The Copyright Alliance goes a step further and says that a public research grant is no reason to “commandeer the resulting research paper and treat it as a public domain work”. BTW, the word “surrender” was first introduced into this context by the press release announcing the launch of PRISM in August 2007.

If the publishers could claim infringement, they would. They would have a remedy at law and would not need to amend the law to get it. But a specific charge like infringement is too easy to evaluate and dismiss. Hence, we face nebulous charges like “inconsistency with copyright law” or “diminished copyright protections”.

The NIH uses a simple and elegant method to avoid infringement. When researchers publish an article based on NIH-funded research, they must retain the right to grant PubMed Central a non-exclusive license to disseminate a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscript. They may transfer all the remaining rights to publishers, if they wish, and they usually do.

There many ways to describe the result. Open access through PubMed Central is expressly authorized by the copyright holders. Publishers no longer acquire full copyright to articles by NIH-funded authors, at least when those authors comply with the policy. Publishers don’t acquire the rights they would need to negate the NIH’s non-exclusive license or claim infringement. When researchers sign their funding contracts with the NIH, they are not committing any publisher to anything, let alone taking any intellectual property from anyone; they are only committing themselves to demand certain terms when they later write up and try to publish articles based on their funded research. The NIH is taking advantage of two important facts: (1) that authors are the copyright holders until they decide to transfer one or more of their rights to someone else, and (2) that researchers sign funding contracts before they sign publishing contracts.

It seems to me that the way AAAS treats access to Science is not all that different from the way AMS treats access to its journals, books and Math Reviews. AMS uses income from publishing to subsidize its other activities. I don’t understand if Nature is published by a for profit orgainization or by a non-profit.

But my larger point is: if you are unhappy about access to Science not being free, you should be also unhappy about about AMS and other not-for-profit publishers. And are they really the same as Elsevier?

Eugene wrote:

But my larger point is: if you are unhappy about access to Science not being free, you should be also unhappy about about AMS and other not-for-profit publishers.

I guess I wasn’t very clear. I’m unhappy that Science and Nature seem to prevent their authors from making versions of their papers available on their personal websites. At least, this is my conclusion after trying to find such papers. The AMS very clearly does allow authors to keep papers on their websites, and also on the arXiv.

But while we’re at it, let’s not forget that every issue of the AMS Bulletin is now free online: all the issues from 1891 to the current one are available here, so now we can all read stuff like this:

• Felix Klein, A comparative review of recent researches in geometry (translation of the Erlanger Programme by M. W. Haskell), Bull. AMS 2 (1893) 215-249.
• Felix Klein, Inaugural address (delivered at the general session of the congress of mathematics and astronomy at Chicago, August 31, 1896), Bull. AMS 3 (1893), 1–3.
• Felix Klein, Riemann and his significance for the development of modern mathematics, Bull. AMS 1 (1895), 165-180.

(In case you’re wondering about the non-monotonicity of volume numbers, it seems that in the old days the volume numbers started from 1 each year.)