Right now we're getting increasing FUD from the sides of Elsevier Co
against emerging open content journals. I don't think there's a turning
of the tide, though, as early adopters have already embraced alternative
channels of publication (physicists and math people foremost in arXiv),
and it's only a matter of time before more conservative branches of
science (medical, chemistry and biology people: that's you) are to follow.
We might be getting the publishing monopolists to try grasping for DRM for
paper copyright. I'm wondering why they haven't started watermarking
their .pdfs yet, shough a crawler looking for phrases or computing
document hashes would do just as nicely.
Either way, the librarians are attempting to revolt using whatever
little leverage they have. Fact is, the budgets are shrinking, and
the shelves are emptying, while the content owners have established
a de facto pay per view.
- Forwarded message from Sam Joseph [EMAIL PROTECTED] -
From: Sam Joseph [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 11:06:08 +0900
To: Peer-to-peer development. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Peer-to-Peer Journal (P2PJ) CFP
Organization: NeuroGrid http://www.neurogrid.net/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ja-JP;
rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Peer-to-peer development. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hi David,
Although I agree with you about the copyright issue, I think that this
kind of thing is pretty common with academic journals. I'm not saying
that makes it right, but it is true. Every time I get a paper published
in a book or journal I have to sign away my rights to the paper.
It is a wonderful little earner for the academic publishing industry
generally. They have academics working for free to generate the
content, and then they charge other academics to get access to the
journal. I think it is another one of those fucked up things that we
can't do very much about. However I would imagine that the publishers
of academic journals would say that there is such low readership that
without free content and exorbitant fees to libraries the entire thing
would not be profitable, i.e. they couldn't make enough money to pay the
people who work to actually print the journal. At the moment P2PJournal
is not making any money, is not charging you to read the journal, and
everyone is putting in their time for free. As it happens I have yet to
have any say in the copyright issues. I'm working on trying to get the
P2PJournal to serve the best interests of the P2P community. I will
pass on your comments to the Editor-in-chief.
BTW, I think the standard deal with most journals is that you can
publish the work on your own personal website as well - but it would be
good to make that explicit.
As for a complete copyright share - personally that sounds fine to me,
but one could argue that if the same work was completely free to be
published anywhere else then why would anyone want to read the
P2PJournal. I'm not sure I totally buy the argument myself, but I think
the reason that most academic journals and conferences give for holding
on to the copyright of the papers they publish is that if they didn't
then they would be unable to maintain their readership or attendees.
Whether this is true or not is open to question.
There is also a sot of contradiction in terms of having a P2PJournal
with restrictive copyright rules - but then such is life. Let us see
what we can evolve.
CHEERS SAM
David Gvthberg wrote:
I checked out your writer's guidelines and was somewhat shocked.
You state that after accepting submission of a paper to your journal,
the journal (that is Raymond F. Gao, Editor-in-Chief) gets the copyright
of the submitted text.
That's pretty silly especially since you don't even pay for the work
and expect people to write about their inventions and research.
When my mother hired an artist to do the pictures to her children's
books we used a much better way: We signed a contract stating a split
or shared copyright. That is, both the artist and my mother can do
what they want with the pictures. Thus both parties can reprint them,
sell them and use them in any way they see fit and booth are happy!
I suggest you should do the same, or people like me will never bother
to write for your journal. Among other things, your rule makes it
impossible to send you texts that one has already published in other
places and your rule makes it impossible to reuse that material as
one sees fit. If I write about my inventions I of course want to be
able to reuse any text I write about them. But writing for you is
a one time thing and thus not worth the effort.
And don't just say: This is how it is normally done. Just because
it's common to do like that it doesn't make it right.
But I do like the thought of a p2p journal!
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