
Princeton bans academics from handing copyright to journal publishers - jamesbritt
http://theconversation.edu.au/princeton-bans-academics-from-handing-copyright-to-journal-publishers-3596
======
kragen
This is an interesting case where you can improve your negotiating leverage by
giving up freedom. Consider a researcher who wants their research to be open
access. They can attempt to negotiate this every time they send a paper to a
journal, but most researchers are not in a very strong negotiating position
relative to the journal. Or they can accept a postdoc position at Princeton,
which now means that every time they submit a paper, they must inform the
journal that unfortunately they cannot assign copyright.

There are many journals who would be willing to decline to publish the papers
of an individual intransigent researcher. There are not many journals who
would be willing to ban papers from Princeton entirely.

As an example, Dan Bernstein, who is certainly a well-respected researcher in
his field, has individually adopted a policy of dedicating his papers to the
public domain so that, like researchers employed by the US Government, he
cannot assign copyright in them. The IEEE has consequently decided to reject
his papers even when its referees accept them, even though they accept papers
from US Government researchers: <http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html>

This kind of phenomenon, where giving up freedom improves your negotiating
position, was extensively studied by Schelling in his theory of negotiation.

It's also very relevant to the debate over Treacherous (or "Trusted")
Computing, signed bootloaders, and the like. You might prefer not to have the
option of cryptographically certifying to Warner Music that your machine is
running an approved operating system on approved hardware. That's because if
you have that option, they might not sell you music unless you exercise it,
probably giving up many of the rights you have under copyright law; while if
you don't have that option, they are faced with a less tempting choice of only
selling you a CD.

Advocates of these systems sometimes design systems where you have full
freedom to run either signed or unsigned software, claiming that this makes
their systems safe from abuse. This overlooks this phenomenon, where having a
freedom makes you subject to pressure to exercise it.

~~~
jackpirate
This is much more like collective bargaining than giving up freedom. If a
researcher _individually_ says I will never assign copyright, then they will
never get published. If a _group of researchers_ (let's call it a union) bands
together, then they get a lot more negotiating power.

~~~
ggchappell
> This is much more like collective bargaining than giving up freedom.

Well, it _is_ giving up freedom, regardless of what it is _like_.

Keep in mind that there is a strong tradition in political discourse (in the
U.S. at least) that using the word "freedom" is a signal that we are in favor
of something, and thus, that "giving up freedom" is a negative thing. However,
"freedom" is a word with a clear definition, and we can use it without
intending the above signal.

So, it seems to me that this policy of Princeton's is a fine idea. It is
nonetheless a reduction in the freedom of Princeton's faculty.

In contrast, at my own university the faculty contract explicitly assigns
rights in their research to the researcher. The university gets a royalty-free
license, but that's it. I have never had occasion to consider this contractual
clause in a negative light, but here it is: my university could not enact a
policy like Princeton's without violating the contract. (OTOH, my university
is not nearly as big of a player as Princeton; at present such a policy would
probably not be helpful.)

~~~
vacri
Then there's irony afoot - because by 'giving up freedom', they're gaining
more freedom to do what they want to do.

Couching this in terms of freedom is the wrong way to think about the issue,
methinks - it detracts from the real issue. Freedom in the US is a _very_
politically charged word - as an outsider visiting the US, I could hear a
capital F in the word almost every time I heard it in public.

~~~
bluedanieru
It's politically charged but has little meaning. "They hate us for our
Freedom" and "They hate us for being American" are virtually synonymous.

As such I welcome someone using the word correctly for once.

~~~
vacri
In real terms, in the modern day, Americans are no freer than their
contemporaries. They're a bit freer here and a bit less free there, but
there's a lot of equivalence in the limitations of what you can do, both
legally and culturally.

I certainly found when I visited the US for a while that there was nothing I
felt I was freer to do legally (tourists don't really get to 'bear arms'), but
plenty I couldn't do _culturally_ \- ironically mostly about speaking freely
in public. I imagine an American visiting Australia would feel similar
cultural restrictions, but again, no particular activity they're used to would
be forbidden them legally.

I guess it just irritates when you run into those particular folks who define
themselves as 'free' and making you out to be 'not free' by comparison.

------
jforman
A little known fact: the vast majority of grants (by volume of cash) are
technically awarded to the professor's university rather than to the professor
him/herself, giving the university broad control over the product of the
professor's research. At least, this is the case in the life sciences.

From time to time, this yields something good. Props to the grad school I
dropped out of :)

~~~
impendia
And don't forget about the 40% the university skims off the top (aka "indirect
costs").

~~~
larsberg
Overhead on grants is > 50%. The exact rate is negotiated between your
university and its major funding agency (NSF or NIH), depending on which
provides more grant money in total to your institution. That rate is then used
uniformly across all grants.

~~~
Estragon
Yes, Universities have become fiscalized to an extent. They increasingly
behave more like businesses whose purpose is to extract grant money from the
government than institutions committed to learning and research.

"The Heart of Research is Sick"
[http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt02/lt_2011_...](http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt02/lt_2011_02_24_31.pdf)

    
    
      Essentially, it’s the publication process.  It has become a system of
      collecting counters for particular purposes – to get grants, to get
      tenure, etc. – rather than to communicate and illuminate findings to
      other people.  The literature is, by and large, unreadable.  It’s all
      written in a kind of code, with inappropriate data in large amounts,
      and the storyline is becoming increasingly orchestrated by this need
      to publish. We all know it. We all suffer from it. I think the changes
      to the scientific enterprise have been inexorable and progressive. The
      deterioration has been so steady that people don’t really realise how
      much things have changed.

~~~
_delirium
A problem for many universities is that they don't even really succeed at it.
This grant-sucking infrastructure isn't free, and apart from the direct costs
of grantwriting / paperwork / etc., universities sometimes even undertake
major expenditures with a view towards making themselves more attractive to
grants, e.g. tailoring construction or hiring towards grant opportunities,
flying people around and hosting events to oil the gears of potential
partnerships, etc., etc.

The top research universities pull in enough grants to make that all worth it,
but many smaller universities don't ever come out ahead, though they like to
pretend they do. There are small schools where they consider it a huge success
that they land a $1m NSF grant now and then, but they are almost certainly
spending more than $1m every few years to do so. In addition, even when you
_do_ land grants, co-financing is becoming more popular, so the university
ends up having to kick in even more money in the successful case.

A bit more on that from Georgia Tech's former CS dean: [http://innovate-
wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...](http://innovate-
wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-
research/)

------
impendia
Clicking through to the response from Wiley and Elsevier is interesting.

Wiley: "Naturally, we are concerned that posting the final versions of
published articles in Open Access and institutional repositories lacking
viable business models may have an adverse impact on the business of scholarly
communication."

TL;DR: Universities should continue to pay us, because otherwise we won't make
any money.

------
movingahead
From a student point of view, this is great news. If you don't have a personal
subscription to the digital libraries of IEEE/ACM, the amount of hoops that
one has to go through to access a research paper, is apalling. I believe that
a peer review system used by journals is beneficial, but putting the papers
behind a paywall is obstructing access to knowledge.

If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share
it.

~~~
jessriedel
I think "appalling" is a bit of hyperbole. I'm for open access, but students
at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want
for free at their library. In addition, many/most school have a proxy system
so the student can access these resources from home.

The situation is a lot worse for the general public, although even then many
public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.

~~~
pradocchia
_students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles
they want for free at their library._

Some of us have finished school and left the academy, but would still like to
read an journal article from time to time.

~~~
jessriedel
movingahead's comment started with "From a student point of view...", and that
was the area I was discussing.

~~~
pradocchia
From context, he appears to mean "one who studies", rather than "one who's in
school."

------
itsnotvalid
I can't say how much I like this ban. For so many times since I left school
and wanted to read an article or so, and be greeted with "summary" of that
article. I don't really need to pay $25, for the fact that the journal may
have obtained the copyright and sold it to some journal sites.

We could use some open-source concepts for paper publishing.

~~~
davidblair
arxiv.org has >700,000 open access articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer
Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. It's a
great resource.

The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing.
This can really take a substantial portion of someones time. I don't think it
justifies a $25 (sometimes over $40) fee to see an article printed 8 years ago
though.

~~~
ggchappell
> The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and
> printing.

Nope, just printing.

Peer review is unpaid. In technical fields, at least, editing these days is
done by the author (and/or whoever assists at the author's institution) and
sometimes by peer reviewers. With LaTeX being standard, the author even does
the great majority of the typesetting work. None of these people are funded by
the journal. So you are certainly right about the time required; but the
people who spend all this time never see that money.

Now forget the paper version and just put it all on the web, and we see that
an academic journal can be run very cheaply indeed.

~~~
davidblair
I phrased that poorly. You are absolutely right, peer reviewers are unpaid.

I also have a big problem with the fact that journals receive a perpetual
copyright to the work instead of it becoming an open license 6-months to a
year after publication.

Returning to the cost issue. The cost I am referring to comes from paying for
the software to manage the peer review process and the time it takes to build
the relationships to have enough reviewers available to deal with the first
submission and the revision that will almost likely occur.

To put out a single issue with 20 articles can easily involve 50 reviewers and
at least 40 authors.

It is the social science and humanities journals that have real problems with
getting papers ready for print. It's easy to only think about scientific
journals but the reality is a great deal of researchers only have sufficient
computer skills. They will write a professional paper and do the best they can
to format it but it isn't anywhere near ready to send to the printers.

Large journals can easily cover these costs. Small journals are really
struggling to get by. I hear small journal editors talking about how long they
will be able to survive. They want to make it work but just don't know how.

It's not an easy problem to solve.

~~~
itsnotvalid
Having articles edited and organized for peer review would then make users of
those materials pay for a large sum is still unjustified, given that the cost
of producing the material is largely not paid by the publisher.

You may say that the cost of getting an article for $25 is fair given the
amount of work done by the publisher is fair, but the author, to my knowledge
(since I am not an author of any sorts) they don't receive any payment due to
these transactions. I am noy paying for the editing and publishing, I am only
paying for the content (more true to CS / science fields, where TeX stuff are
pretty common)

What really need to change is the journal oriented way of publishing papers,
we don't need to have stuff printed these days, as far as my university life
went, I have only read one or two articles in printed form because I happened
to be inside the library.

As much as computerized content goes, layout and stuff are much more
automatic, and by providing writers with better and simplier tools, we may be
able to save more trees by going digital.

------
joelthelion
The problem with this approach is that smaller universities can't afford to do
this.

I think this problem needs to be adressed at funding agency level, with
funding agencies requiring that all publication be made available on the
agency's website.

~~~
impendia
+1 to you, but somebody needed to make the first move, and I think most
professors at smaller universities would be happy to publish wherever
professors at Princeton are publishing.

~~~
elehack
In some fields, I think this may have huge impact. No math or CS journal would
want to be unable to accept Princeton publications.

Even if publishers make exemptions rather than change their policies, it sets
a precedent that exemptions can be made for institutional requirements.

------
ernesth
From Springer's "copyright transer statement": An author may self-archive an
author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website. He/she may
also deposit this version on his/her institution's and funder's repository at
the funder request or as a result of a legal obligation...

Many publishers have a similar clause. My institution (a french research
institute) also requires me to put my publications on their public repository
and it does not create problems for journals in CS.

Non-false title may be "Princeton bans publishers from handling copyright to
journal publishers who ban authors from publishing their articles on their
website."

~~~
crocowhile
The key word here is "author-created version". After publication you are
allowed to put a preprint version of your manuscript on your website but you
can't upload the PDF of your final paper. Most people do that anyway but it's
technically not allowed.

Princeton wants to stop this.

~~~
anghyflawn
Again, it varies by publisher. For instance, CUP (at least for the type of
journals that I read) allows the author to put up a preprint (before peer
review) or a postprint (after review but before editing) on a personal page or
the institutional repository immediately on acceptance; once the final version
is available on their website (I think), you can also put it up on your own
page; and once a year has passed after publication, you can also upload it to
the repository. It's not optimal, but it's much better than nothing.

~~~
streptomycin
It does vary widely from publisher to publisher. Here is a database of
publisher policies on this issue: <http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/>

------
URSpider94
It's my understanding that research done at government labs comes with a
similar restriction, and that it's been standard practice for years for these
researchers to reserve copyright on their publications. If that's true, then
this will give Princeton researchers the leverage they need to retain
copyright to their publications. Even though there's theoretically a waiver
process, I'm going to bet that most authors won't want to go through that
process, since the work is more valuable to them if they retain the ability to
distribute it themselves.

~~~
jforman
Government employees' work by law is in the public domain:

"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the
United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded
from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment,
bequest, or otherwise." (17 U.S.C. § 105)

"A 'work of the United States Government' is a work prepared by an officer or
employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official
duties." (17 U.S.C. § 101)

...although I disagree that the pressure to give away copyright is weak. At
least in the life sciences, the prestige you get from a publication in, say,
Nature or Science is far more valuable than the work alone.

------
DanielBMarkham
_...The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in
practice..._

Er, hello? If the policy is just a paper tiger, perhaps that fact should go in
the title?

I think this is a great step, but if it's largely symbolic, that's a pretty
important part of the story and doesn't deserve to be in paragraph 10

I'm left questioning how much is real and how much is spin, which is not where
I want to be as a reader.

------
BonoboBoner
Sometimes I think the academic publishing mechanisms are broken. It takes so
much time for your idea and research to be visible... you write the paper, it
get reviewed, presented on a conference, published in journals and then
months/years later someone actually sees it.

Compare that to the web, where an elaborate blog post and a project on GitHub
is enough to become visible to the entire world within hours.

Percentage wise, how much influence did academic papers have on your day to
day work in the last year compared to new stuff you found on the web?

~~~
ollysb
Is there any reason why publications can't be publicly available before they
are reviewed? The journals could still play the same role, highlighting the
most significant publications. I'm not an academic so I'm not familiar with
the feedback process between a journal and a paper's author. Is there any
reason that any refinements couldn't take place in public. A version of github
focused on academic papers would seem like a good model.

~~~
copper
When a paper fits into one of the categories arXiv accepts, that's more or
less what happens (modulo the cranks who claim to prove Riemann's hypothesis
every now and then, but that's a whole different topic :)

The difficulty is that some publishers don't allow you to make pdfs of the
final versions of papers freely available. Of course, you can always publish
draft versions, which is not entirely a bad thing.

------
mhb
Sounds good, but a truck-sized loophole?

 _In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the
academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a
waiver from the open access policy from the University.

The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in
practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to
adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a
limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”_

~~~
shabble
Make the application procedure time and effort consuming (Although I can't
imagine how university policies could be anything but) and hope to induce
researchers to submit to publications that don't require the waiver.

It's a bit unfair to the actual researchers, but if they start putting
pressure on the journal publishers -- "Sorry, you've got a high impact factor
and I'd love to publish with you, but I can't justify the 2 weeks of fighting
with the bureaucracy about a waiver" -- and you might see some progress.

Or their grad students will get another shitty task piled on their list.
Hmmmmm.

------
a3_nm
It's not as good as the title says. The journal publishers will still own the
copyright, they will just have to license some rights to the university.

~~~
amirhhz
From the article: "academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton
University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and
all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium,
whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the
University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”"

That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does
or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A
compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have
access.

~~~
itsnotvalid
If more universities support this kind of policies, the momentum could break
the current problem of priced access to results of research that are not in
any way, paid by the journal publishers. As indicated by the article, peer
reviewers are not paid for that, and so merely the editors are paid in due
course. However, charging for the price of what an article needs, is far from
what the cost could really justify itself with.

Just have a thought, do we really need journal publishers these days? It was
once a time we don't have any means than print publishing to exchange views,
now we have the series of tubes to do so.

~~~
william42
The main thing the journals produce is prestige.

~~~
PotatoEngineer
That, and reliability. You're assured that some kind of peer-review happened,
at some point, and that some standards were met. What standards, and what kind
of peer review, will differ per journal.

------
robryan
I think there still definitely needs to be some sort of filter for academic
research. Probably not the journal system anymore but something has to replace
it, as most don't have time to trawl through things of questionable quality in
the hope of finding something useful.

~~~
tzs
What I think might be good would be something like this. It's based on the
notion that being a good researcher and being good at reading and reviewing
research papers are not necessarily the same skill.

1\. Have a place for open publication, like arxiv.org, but with a system of
non-anonymous commenting and rating. So if someone puts a paper there, others
can comment on it and rate it. Ratings could include several categories, such
as clarity, importance, rigor, and so on.

2\. There should be a system to rate the reviewers.

3\. Out of this would emerge a growing collection of reviewers who are
recognized as being very good at reviewing papers.

4\. Reviewers would start publishing lists of papers they have recently
reviewed, broken down by field.

5\. Scientists would subscribe to these lists from the top reviewers in their
field.

6\. Reviewing could become a profession. A researcher who wants to make sure
his paper gets attention could pay one or more high rated reviewers to review
it. Note that for reviewers it is important to maintain a reputation as an
accurate and honest reviewer, which I think would be enough of a safe guard
against authors being able to buy good reviews for bad papers.

~~~
impendia
This is a good idea, but I think even something much simpler along these lines
would work.

If arXiv allowed for signed comments, then famous people could say as little
as "This is an interesting paper, and everyone interested in X should read
it", and that would do a lot for the reputations of unknown people who are
doing good work.

------
chalst
With much the same effect, MIT and Harvard have demand the right to make
available their researcher's publications, with a similar opt-out clause.

The experience is that the opt-out does get used a fair bit in biomed.

------
coliveira
Princeton is not the first institution to do this, and many publishers have
been flexible if you don't want to handle copyright for your work. I think
this won't change much because academics are still required to publish in the
same journals, and references are made to journal publications instead of web
sites. Even today one can easily post papers in their personal website without
problems.

~~~
kragen
What other institutions do this?

~~~
coliveira
I know about AT&T Labs. There are others with similar requirements, and
publishers know this.

------
StevanHarnad
LIKE ITS HARVARD MODEL, PRINCETON'S OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO ADD AN
IMMEDIATE-DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT, WITH NO WAIVER OPTION

[http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.h...](http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.html)

1\. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!)
for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted
by unanimous faculty vote.

2\. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the
copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.

4\. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by
adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its
copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.

5\. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-
reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow
authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal
does not agree to the copyright-reservation.

6\. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains
all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while
ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional
repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited
article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright
matter, deposit is not.

7\. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to
reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is
the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are
now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access
policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.

8\. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and
without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles
are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the
policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement.

[Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been
adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors
to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as
possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they
pledge from the outset...]

Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship

